Lake ice, as part of the Essential Climate Variable (ECV) lakes, is an important indicator to monitor climate change and global warming. The spatio-temporal extent of lake ice cover, along with the timings of key phenological events such as freeze-up and break-up, provide important cues about the local and global climate. We present a lake ice monitoring system based on the automatic analysis of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data with a deep neural network. In previous studies that used optical satellite imagery for lake ice monitoring, frequent cloud cover was a main limiting factor, which we overcome thanks to the ability of microwave sensors to penetrate clouds and observe the lakes regardless of the weather and illumination conditions. We cast ice detection as a two class (frozen, non-frozen) semantic segmentation problem and solve it using a state-of-the-art deep convolutional network (CNN). We report results on two winters ( 2016 - 17 and 2017 - 18 ) and three alpine lakes in Switzerland. The proposed model reaches mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) scores >90% on average, and >84% even for the most difficult lake. Additionally, we perform cross-validation tests and show that our algorithm generalises well across unseen lakes and winters.
Automatized marine vessel monitoring from sentinel-1 data using convolution neural network
Center for Environment & Water, Research Institute, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals（法赫德国王石油与矿产大学环境与水研究中心）；University of Petroleum and Energy Studies（石油与能源研究大学）；Dr. B.C. Roy Engineering College（B.C.罗伊博士工程学院）；CubicX
针对传统 CFAR 船舶检测缺乏决策能力的问题，提出基于小波变换的卷积神经网络，利用 Sentinel-1 双极化 SAR 数据实现印度西海岸繁忙交通场景下的船舶自动识别，检测准确率达 95.46%。
University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）；Centre Tecnològic Telecomunicacions Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚电信技术中心）；University of Padua（帕多瓦大学）
In this letter, we use deep-learning convolution neural networks (CNNs) to assess the landslide mapping and classification performances on optical images (from Sentinel-2) and SAR images (from Sentinel-1). The training and test zones used to independently evaluate the performance of the CNNs on different datasets are located in the eastern Iburi subprefecture in Hokkaido, where, at 03.08 local time (JST) on September 6, 2018, an Mw 6.6 earthquake triggered about 8000 coseismic landslides. We analyzed the conditions before and after the earthquake exploiting multi-polarization SAR as well as op…
Global Offshore Wind Infrastructure: Deployment and Operational Dynamics from Dense Sentinel-1 Time Series
Earth Observation Center (EOC), German Aerospace Center (DLR)（地球观测中心（EOC），德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Institute for Geography and Geology, University of Wuerzburg（地理与地质研究所，乌尔姆大学）
ICEYE Oy（ICEYE公司）；VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland（芬兰VTT技术研究中心）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）
Land cover mapping is essential to monitoring the environment and understanding the effects of human activities on it. The automatic approaches to land cover mapping (i.e., image segmentation) mostly used traditional machine learning that requires heuristic feature design. On natural images, deep learning has outperformed traditional machine learning approaches for image segmentation. On remote sensing images, recent studies demonstrate successful applications of specific deep learning models to small-scale land cover mapping tasks (e.g., to classify wetland complexes). However, it is not read…
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Beijing Institute of Control and Electronic Technology（北京控制与电子技术研究所）
Co-registering the Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical data of European Space Agency (ESA) is of great importance for many remote sensing applications. However, we find that there are evident misregistration shifts between the Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical images that are directly downloaded from the official website. To address that, this paper presents a fast and effective registration method for the two types of images. In the proposed method, a block-based scheme is first designed to extract evenly distributed interest points. Then the correspondences are detected by using the si…
Enhancing sea ice segmentation in Sentinel-1 images with atrous convolutions
University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Norwegian Meteorological Institute（挪威气象研究所）；National Snow and Ice Data Center（国家冰雪数据中心）；CIRES（CIRES（环境科学研究合作研究所））
本文针对 Sentinel-1 SAR 海冰制图自动化难题，提出结合 ResNet 与空洞空间金字塔池化的分割方法，在 Extreme Earth version 2 数据集上实现高效、抗噪的海冰与冰型分类，性能优于基线 U-Net。
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））
The availability of curated large-scale training data is a crucial factor for the development of well-generalizing deep learning methods for the extraction of geoinformation from multi-sensor remote sensing imagery. While quite some datasets have already been published by the community, most of them suffer from rather strong limitations, e.g. regarding spatial coverage, diversity or simply number of available samples. Exploiting the freely available data acquired by the Sentinel satellites of the Copernicus program implemented by the European Space Agency, as well as the cloud computing facili…
Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院巴黎电信学院）；Laboratoire Hubert Curien（于贝尔·居里安实验室）
Deep learning approaches show unprecedented results for speckle reduction in SAR amplitude images. The wide availability of multi-temporal stacks of SAR images can improve even further the quality of denoising. In this paper, we propose a flexible yet efficient way to integrate temporal information into a deep neural network for speckle suppression. Archives provide access to long time-series of SAR images, from which multi-temporal averages can be computed with virtually no remaining speckle fluctuations. The proposed method combines this multi-temporal average and the image at a given date i…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学信息与电子学院）
Contrary to optical images, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are in different electromagnetic spectrum where the human visual system is not accustomed to. Thus, with more and more SAR applications, the demand for enhanced high-quality SAR images has increased considerably. However, high-quality SAR images entail high costs due to the limitations of current SAR devices and their image processing resources. To improve the quality of SAR images and to reduce the costs of their generation, we propose a Dialectical Generative Adversarial Network (Dialectical GAN) to generate high-quality SAR i…
Forests are vital for the wellbeing of our planet. Large and small scale deforestation across the globe is threatening the stability of our climate, forest biodiversity, and therefore the preservation of fragile ecosystems and our natural habitat as a whole. With increasing public interest in climate change issues and forest preservation, a large demand for carbon offsetting, carbon footprint ratings, and environmental impact assessments is emerging. Most often, deforestation maps are created from optical data such as Landsat and MODIS. These maps are not typically available at less than annua…
LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院巴黎电信学院LTCI）；Univ Lyon, UJM-Saint-Etienne（里昂大学圣艾蒂安让·莫内大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Laboratoire Hubert Curien UMR 5516（于贝尔·居里安实验室（UMR 5516））
Reducing speckle and limiting the variations of the physical parameters in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is often a key-step to fully exploit the potential of such data. Nowadays, deep learning approaches produce state of the art results in single-image SAR restoration. Nevertheless, huge multi-temporal stacks are now often available and could be efficiently exploited to further improve image quality. This paper explores two fast strategies employing a single-image despeckling algorithm, namely SAR2SAR, in a multi-temporal framework. The first one is based on Quegan filter and replaces…
Large-Scale Avalanche Mapping from SAR Images with Deep Learning-based Change Detection
Department of Theoretical and Applied Sciences, University of Insubria（理论与应用科学系，意大利因布里亚大学）；Department of Science and High Technology, University of Insubria（科学与高新技术系，意大利因布里亚大学）
Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc（萨瓦大学）；TotalEnergies S.E.（道达尔能源公司）
Ocean surface monitoring, especially oil slick detection, has become mandatory due to its importance for oil exploration and risk prevention on ecosystems. For years, the detection task has been performed manually by photo-interpreters using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images with the help of contextual data such as wind. This tedious manual work cannot handle the increasing amount of data collected by the available sensors and thus requires automation. Literature reports conventional and semi-automated detection methods that generally focus either on oil slicks originating from anthropogen…
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology（瑞士联邦水科学与技术研究所）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）
Fusing satellite imagery acquired with different sensors has been a long-standing challenge of Earth observation, particularly across different modalities such as optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. Here, we explore the joint analysis of imagery from different sensors in the light of representation learning: we propose to learn a joint embedding of multiple satellite sensors within a deep neural network. Our application problem is the monitoring of lake ice on Alpine lakes. To reach the temporal resolution requirement of the Swiss Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) office, w…
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constitutes a fundamental asset for wide-areas monitoring with high-resolution requirements. The first SAR sensors have given rise to coarse coastal and maritime monitoring applications, including oil spill, ship and ice floes detection. With the upgrade to very high-resolution sensors in the recent years, with relatively new SAR missions such as Sentinel-1, a great deal of data providing a stronger information content has been released, enabling more refined studies on general targets features and thus permitting complex classifications, as for ship classificati…
TerraNIS；University of Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；IRIT-INP-ENSEEIHT；TéSA；IRIT-UPS
This paper studies the detection of anomalous crop development at the parcel-level based on an unsupervised outlier detection technique. The experimental validation is conducted on rapeseed and wheat parcels located in Beauce (France). The proposed methodology consists of four sequential steps: 1) preprocessing of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and multispectral images acquired using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites, 2) extraction of SAR and multispectral pixel-level features, 3) computation of parcel-level features using zonal statistics and 4) outlier detection. The different types of an…
In this paper, we present a ship detection pipeline for low-cost medium resolution satellite optical imagery obtained from ESA Sentinel-2 and Planet Labs Dove constellations. This optical satellite imagery is readily available for any place on Earth and underutilized in the maritime domain, compared to existing solutions based on synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We developed a ship detection method based on a state-of-the-art deep-learning-based object detection method which was developed and evaluated on a large-scale dataset that was collected and automatically annotated with the help…
The effective combination of the complementary information provided by the huge amount of unlabeled multi-sensor data (e.g., Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical images) is a critical topic in remote sensing. Recently, contrastive learning methods have reached remarkable success in obtaining meaningful feature representations from multi-view data. However, these methods only focus on image-level features, which may not satisfy the requirement for dense prediction tasks such as land-cover mapping. In this work, we propose a self-supervised framework for SAR-optical data fusion and land-co…
Deep Self-Supervised Disturbance Mapping with the OPERA Sentinel-1 Radiometric Terrain Corrected SAR Backscatter Product
University of California - Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）；Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, University of California - Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校区域地球系统科学与工程联合研究所）
本文基于 OPERA RTC-S1 数据训练无需标签的自监督 vision transformer，通过逐像素基线分布偏差检测地表扰动，并在三地灾害事件中取得优于现有方法的结果。
Due to climate and land-use change, natural disasters such as flooding have been increasing in recent years. Timely and reliable flood detection and mapping can help emergency response and disaster management. In this work, we propose a flood detection network using bi-temporal SAR acquisitions. The proposed segmentation network has an encoder-decoder architecture with two Siamese encoders for pre and post-flood images. The network's feature maps are fused and enhanced using attention blocks to achieve more accurate detection of the flooded areas. Our proposed network is evaluated on publicly …
Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院巴黎电信学院）；Laboratoire Hubert Curien（于贝尔·居里安实验室）
This paper presents a despeckling method for Sentinel-1 GRD images based on the recently proposed framework "SAR2SAR": a self-supervised training strategy. Training the deep neural network on collections of Sentinel 1 GRD images leads to a despeckling algorithm that is robust to space-variant spatial correlations of speckle. Despeckled images improve the detection of structures like narrow rivers. We apply a detector based on exogenous information and a linear features detector and show that rivers are better segmented when the processing chain is applied to images pre-processed by our despeck…
CerraData-4MM: A multimodal benchmark dataset on Cerrado for land use and land cover classification
Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE)（巴西国家空间研究院）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ)（德国国际合作机构）
UiT the Arctic University of Norway（特罗姆瑟大学－挪威北极大学）；NORCE, The Norwegian Research Centre AS（NORCE挪威研究中心）
Knowledge about frequency and location of snow avalanche activity is essential for forecasting and mapping of snow avalanche hazard. Traditional field monitoring of avalanche activity has limitations, especially when surveying large and remote areas. In recent years, avalanche detection in Sentinel-1 radar satellite imagery has been developed to improve monitoring. However, the current state-of-the-art detection algorithms, based on radar signal processing techniques, are still much less accurate than human experts. To reduce this gap, we propose a deep learning architecture for detecting aval…
Active InSAR monitoring of building damage in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas War
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, City University of New York Graduate Center（纽约城市大学地球与环境科学系）；Geography Program, College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学地球、海洋和大气科学学院地理系）
In this work, we present a methodology for monitoring man-made, construction-like activities in low-resolution SAR imagery. Our source of data is the European Space Agency Sentinel-l satellite which provides global coverage at a 12-day revisit rate. Despite limitations in resolution, our methodology enables us to monitor activity levels (i.e. presence of vehicles, equipment) of a pre-defined location by analyzing the texture of detected SAR imagery. Using an exploratory dataset, we trained a support vector machine (SVM), a random binary forest, and a fully-connected neural network for classifi…
Deep learning (DL) has proven to be a suitable approach for despeckling synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. So far, most DL models are trained to reduce speckle that follows a particular distribution, either using simulated noise or a specific set of real SAR images, limiting the applicability of these methods for real SAR images with unknown noise statistics. In this paper, we present a DL method, deSpeckNet1, that estimates the speckle noise distribution and the despeckled image simultaneously. Since it does not depend on a specific noise model, deSpeckNet generalizes well across SAR acqu…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF), German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR）遥感技术研究所（IMF））；University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest (UPB)（布加勒斯特理工大学（UPB））
Integrating the special electromagnetic characteristics of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in deep neural networks is essential in order to enhance the explainability and physics awareness of deep learning. In this paper, we first propose a novel physically explainable convolutional neural network for SAR image classification, namely physics guided and injected learning (PGIL). It comprises three parts: (1) explainable models (XM) to provide prior physics knowledge, (2) physics guided network (PGN) to encode the knowledge into physics-aware features, and (3) physics injected network (PIN) to ad…
With the increasing availability of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images thanks to the Sentinel constellation, and the explosion of deep learning, new methods have emerged in recent years to tackle the reconstruction of optical images that are impacted by clouds. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of convolutional neural networks that use jointly SAR and optical images to retrieve the missing contents in one single polluted optical image. We propose a simple framework that ease the creation of datasets for the training of deep nets targeting optical image reconstruction, an…
The present work proposes a prototype for an operational method for early deforestation detection of cloudy tropical rainforests. The proposed methodology makes use of Sentinel-1 SAR data processed into the Google Earth Engine platform for flag the areas where the probability of recent deforestation is high. The evaluation of the results over a region on the Eastern Amazon basin showed that copolarized data (VV band) offers the best results in terms of producer's accuracy (95,4% for a 5% significance, 88,9% for 1% significance), while crosspolarized data (VH band) offered excellent results in …
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research（挪威生物经济研究所）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）
Monitoring and managing Earth's forests in an informed manner is an important requirement for addressing challenges like biodiversity loss and climate change. While traditional in situ or aerial campaigns for forest assessments provide accurate data for analysis at regional level, scaling them to entire countries and beyond with high temporal resolution is hardly possible. In this work, we propose a method based on deep ensembles that densely estimates forest structure variables at country-scale with 10-meter resolution, using freely available satellite imagery as input. Our method jointly tra…
University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；German Aerospace Center DLR（德国航空航天中心）；University of Valencia（瓦伦西亚大学）；National Observatory of Athens（雅典国家天文台）；United Nations Satellite Centre（联合国卫星中心）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达公司）；Universidad de Antioquia（安蒂奥基亚大学）
With climate change predicted to increase the likelihood of landslide events, there is a growing need for rapid landslide detection technologies that help inform emergency responses. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a remote sensing technique that can provide measurements of affected areas independent of weather or lighting conditions. Usage of SAR, however, is hindered by domain knowledge that is necessary for the pre-processing steps and its interpretation requires expert knowledge. We provide simplified, pre-processed, machine-learning ready SAR datacubes for four globally located landslid…
Cloud gap-filling with deep learning for improved grassland monitoring
Operational Unit BEYOND Centre for EO Research and Satellite Remote Sensing, Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics Space Applications and Remote Sensing (IAASARS), National Observatory of Athens（运营单位BEYOND地球观测研究与卫星遥感中心、天文、天体物理空间应用与遥感研究所（IAASARS）、雅典国家天文台）；Image Processing Laboratory (IPL), Parc Científic, Universitat de València（图像处理实验室（IPL）、科学公园、瓦伦西亚大学）
