Angular Luminance for Material Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces AngLNet, a novel neural network that leverages angular luminance distributions from multiple images to improve material segmentation accuracy in satellite imagery.

Contribution

The paper presents a new approach using angular luminance distributions and a specialized neural network, AngLNet, for enhanced material segmentation from moving camera sequences.

Findings

AngLNet outperforms previous methods in satellite material segmentation.

Angular luminance distributions provide strong cues for material recognition.

The method effectively manages intra-class variation in real-world materials.

Abstract

Moving cameras provide multiple intensity measurements per pixel, yet often semantic segmentation, material recognition, and object recognition do not utilize this information. With basic alignment over several frames of a moving camera sequence, a distribution of intensities over multiple angles is obtained. It is well known from prior work that luminance histograms and the statistics of natural images provide a strong material recognition cue. We utilize per-pixel {\it angular luminance distributions} as a key feature in discriminating the material of the surface. The angle-space sampling in a multiview satellite image sequence is an unstructured sampling of the underlying reflectance function of the material. For real-world materials there is significant intra-class variation that can be managed by building a angular luminance network (AngLNet). This network combines angular reflectance cues from multiple images with spatial cues as input to fully convolutional networks for material segmentation. We demonstrate the increased performance of AngLNet over prior state-of-the-art in material segmentation from satellite imagery.