Residual Attention Mechanism for Remote Sensing Target Hiding

In this paper, we investigate deep-learning-based image inpainting techniques for emergency remote sensing mapping. Image inpainting can generate fabricated targets to conceal real-world private structures and ensure informational privacy. However, casual inpainting outputs may seem incongruous within original contexts. In addition, the residuals of original targets may persist in the hiding results. A Residual Attention Target-Hiding (RATH) model has been proposed to address these limitations for remote sensing target hiding. The RATH model introduces the residual attention mechanism to replace gated convolutions, thereby reducing parameters, mitigating gradient issues, and learning the distribution of targets present in the original images. Furthermore, this paper modifies the fusion module in the contextual attention layer to enlarge the fusion patch size. We extend the edge-guided function to preserve the original target information and confound viewers. Ablation studies on an open dataset proved the efficiency of RATH for image inpainting and target hiding. RATH had the highest similarity, with a 90.44% structural similarity index metric (SSIM), for edge-guided target hiding. The training parameters had 1M fewer values than gated convolution (Gated Conv). Finally, we present two automated target-hiding techniques that integrate semantic segmentation with direct target hiding or edge-guided synthesis for remote sensing mapping applications.