Chang Xu
PhD Student · ECEO Lab, EPFL, Switzerland
I am a PhD student (2024–) at the ECEO Lab, EPFL, supervised by Prof. Devis Tuia (EPFL) and Prof. Sebastian Schemm (University of Cambridge).
My research focuses on pushing the scale limits of visual perception in remote sensing, from detecting extremely small-scale objects to reconstructing high-resolution Earth system dynamics, to support applications such as accurate geo-localization and reliable forecasting of extreme weather events.
Prior to EPFL, I received both my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Electronic Information School, Wuhan University, under the supervision of Prof. Wen Yang, where I worked on object detection and localization with a focus on tiny object detection.
Recent News
2026
2025
2024
2023
May 2023
Award
Best Presentation Award at ICDIP 2023.
Apr 2023
EPFL
Starting a summer internship at EPFL.
Mar 2023
CVPR
Oriented Tiny Object Detection accepted at CVPR 2023.
2022
2021
Selected Publications
* Equal Contribution · # Corresponding Author
Earth System Modeling
GeoFAR: Geography-Informed Frequency-Aware Super-Resolution for Climate Data
Chang Xu#, Gencer Sumbul, Li Mi, Robin Zbinden, Devis Tuia
ICLR 2026
SMARTIES: Spectrum-Aware Multi-Sensor Auto-Encoder for Remote Sensing Images
Gencer Sumbul, Chang Xu, Emanuele Dalsasso, Devis Tuia
ICCV 2025
Small Object Detection
Oriented Tiny Object Detection: A Dataset, Benchmark, and Dynamic Unbiased Learning
Chang Xu, Ruixiang Zhang, Wen Yang#, Haoran Zhu, Fang Xu, Jian Ding, Gui-song Xia
IEEE TPAMI 2025
Dynamic Coarse-to-Fine Learning for Oriented Tiny Object Detection
Chang Xu, Jian Ding, Jinwang Wang, Wen Yang#, Huai Yu, Lei Yu#, Gui-song Xia
CVPR 2023
RFLA: Gaussian Receptive Field based Label Assignment for Tiny Object Detection
Chang Xu, Jinwang Wang, Wen Yang#, Huai Yu, Lei Yu, Gui-song Xia
ECCV 2022
Detecting Tiny Objects in Aerial Images: A Normalized Wasserstein Distance and A New Benchmark
Chang Xu*, Jinwang Wang*, Wen Yang#, Huai Yu, Lei Yu, Gui-song Xia
ISPRS JPRS 2022 · Top-5 cited since 2022
Minimizing Sample Redundancy for Label-efficient Object Detection in Aerial Images
Ruixiang Zhang*, Chang Xu*, Haoran Zhu, Fang Xu, Wen Yang#, Haijian Zhang, Gui-Song Xia
IEEE TGRS 2025
Multi-modal & Cross-modal Learning
Detecting Every Object from Events
Haitian Zhang, Chang Xu, Xinya Wang, Bingde Liu, Guang Hua, Lei Yu, Wen Yang#
IEEE TPAMI 2025
Drone-based RGBT Tiny Person Detection
Yan Zhang*, Chang Xu*, Wen Yang#, Guangjun He, Huai Yu, Lei Yu, Gui-song Xia
ISPRS JPRS 2023
ConGeo: Robust Cross-view Geo-localization across Ground View Variations
Li Mi*, Chang Xu*,#, Javiera Castillo-Navarro, Syrielle Montariol, Wen Yang, Antoine Bosselut, Devis Tuia
ECCV 2024
Learning Cross-view Visual Geo-localization without Ground Truth
Haoyuan Li, Chang Xu, Wen Yang#, Huai Yu, Gui-Song Xia
IEEE TGRS 2024
Education
2024 –
EPFL, Switzerland
PhD Student, Environmental Computational Science and Earth Observation (ECEO)
2023
EPFL, Switzerland
Exchange Master Student
2021 – 2024
Wuhan University, China
M.Sc. in Information and Communication Engineering
2020
University of Oxford, UK
Visiting Student
2017 – 2021
Wuhan University, China
B.Sc. in Electronic Information Engineering
Awards & Honors
2023
Best Presentation Award
ICDIP 2023
2021
Outstanding Graduate Thesis
Top 5% · Wuhan University
2020
Hubei Translation Final Contest
Second Prize · Hubei, China
2019
National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest (Hubei)
First Prize · Hubei, China