An investigation of traffic density changes inside Wuhan during the COVID-19 epidemic with GF-2 time-series images.

In order to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, Wuhan was the first city to implement strict lockdown policy in 2020. Even though numerous researches have discussed the travel restriction between cities and provinces, few studies focus on the effect of transportation control inside the city due to the lack of the measurement and available data in Wuhan. Since the public transports have been shut down in the beginning of city lockdown, the change of traffic density is a good indicator to reflect the intracity population flow. Therefore, in this paper, we collected time-series high-resolution remote sensing images with the resolution of 1 m acquired before, during and after Wuhan lockdown by GF-2 satellite. Vehicles on the road were extracted and counted for the statistics of traffic density to reflect the changes of human transmissions in the whole period of Wuhan lockdown. Open Street Map was used to obtain observation road surfaces, and a vehicle detection method combing morphology filter and deep learning was utilized to extract vehicles with the accuracy of 62.56%. According to the experimental results, the traffic density of Wuhan dropped with the percentage higher than 80%, and even higher than 90% on main roads during city lockdown; after lockdown lift, the traffic density recovered to the normal rate. Traffic density distributions also show the obvious reduction and increase throughout the whole study area. The significant reduction and recovery of traffic density indicates that the lockdown policy in Wuhan show effectiveness in controlling human transmission inside the city, and the city returned to normal after lockdown lift.

Multi-Temporal Scene Classification and Scene Change Detection With Correlation Based Fusion.

Classifying multi-temporal scene land-use categories and detecting their semantic scene-level changes for remote sensing imagery covering urban regions could straightly reflect the land-use transitions. Existing methods for scene change detection rarely focus on the temporal correlation of bi-temporal features, and are mainly evaluated on small scale scene change detection datasets. In this work, we proposed a CorrFusion module that fuses the highly correlated components in bi-temporal feature embeddings. We first extract the deep representations of the bi-temporal inputs with deep convolutional networks. Then the extracted features will be projected into a lower-dimensional space to extract the most correlated components and compute the instance-level correlation. The cross-temporal fusion will be performed based on the computed correlation in CorrFusion module. The final scene classification results are obtained with softmax layers. In the objective function, we introduced a new formulation to calculate the temporal correlation more efficiently and stably. The detailed derivation of backpropagation gradients for the proposed module is also given. Besides, we presented a much larger scale scene change detection dataset with more semantic categories and conducted extensive experiments on this dataset. The experimental results demonstrated that our proposed CorrFusion module could remarkably improve the multi-temporal scene classification and scene change detection results.