Pix2Streams: Dynamic Hydrology Maps from Satellite-LiDAR Fusion
Frontier Development Lab（前沿发展实验室）；University of Valencia（瓦伦西亚大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；NASA Ames Research Center（美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心）；USGS（美国地质调查局）；RSS-Hydro；University of Bristol（布里斯托尔大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Dolores Garcia, Gonzalo Mateo-Garcia, Hannes Bernhardt, Ron Hagensieker, Ignacio G. Lopez Francos, Jonathan Stock, Guy Schumann, Kevin Dobbs, Freddie Kalaitzis
备注：
Work completed during the 2020 Frontier Development Lab research accelerator, a private-public partnership with NASA in the US, and ESA in Europe. Accepted as a spotlight/long oral talk at AI for Earth Sciences Workshop at NeurIPS 2020
Where are the Earth's streams flowing right now? Inland surface waters expand with floods and contract with droughts, so there is no one map of our streams. Current satellite approaches are limited to monthly observations that map only the widest streams. These are fed by smaller tributaries that make up much of the dendritic surface network but whose flow is unobserved. A complete map of our daily waters can give us an early warning for where droughts are born: the receding tips of the flowing network. Mapping them over years can give us a map of impermanence of our waters, showing where to expect water, and where not to. To that end, we feed the latest high-res sensor data to multiple deep learning models in order to map these flowing networks every day, stacking the times series maps over many years. Specifically, i) we enhance water segmentation to $50$ cm/pixel resolution, a 60$\times$ improvement over previous state-of-the-art results. Our U-Net trained on 30-40cm WorldView3 images can detect streams as narrow as 1-3m (30-60$\times$ over SOTA). Our multi-sensor, multi-res variant, WasserNetz, fuses a multi-day window of 3m PlanetScope imagery with 1m LiDAR data, to detect streams 5-7m wide. Both U-Nets produce a water probability map at the pixel-level. ii) We integrate this water map over a DEM-derived synthetic valley network map to produce a snapshot of flow at the stream level. iii) We apply this pipeline, which we call Pix2Streams, to a 2-year daily PlanetScope time-series of three watersheds in the US to produce the first high-fidelity dynamic map of stream flow frequency. The end result is a new map that, if applied at the national scale, could fundamentally improve how we manage our water resources around the world.
The increasing demand for commodities is leading to changes in land use worldwide. In the tropics, deforestation, which causes high carbon emissions and threatens biodiversity, is often linked to agricultural expansion. While the need for deforestation-free global supply chains is widely recognized, making progress in practice remains a challenge. Here, we propose an automated approach that aims to support conservation and sustainable land use planning decisions by mapping tropical landscapes at large scale and high spatial resolution following the High Carbon Stock (HCS) approach. A deep lear…
Forest canopy height estimation from satellite RGB imagery using large-scale airborne LiDAR-derived training data and monocular depth estimation
Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；CSIRO Environment（英联邦科学与工业研究组织环境部）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）
Geo-Registration of Terrestrial LiDAR Point Clouds with Satellite Images without GNSS
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia（计算机科学与软件工程系，西澳大学）；School of Engineering and Technology, University of New South Wales（工程与技术学院，新南威尔士大学）
Northwestern University（西北大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；HERE Company（HERE公司）
Autonomous driving car is becoming more of a reality, as a key component,high-definition(HD) maps shows its value in both market place and industry. Even though HD maps generation from LiDAR or stereo/perspective imagery has achieved impressive success, its inherent defects cannot be ignored. In this paper, we proposal a novel method for Highway HD maps modeling using pixel-wise segmentation on satellite imagery and formalized hypotheses linking, which is cheaper and faster than current HD maps modeling approaches from LiDAR point cloud and perspective view imagery, and let it becomes an ideal…
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center（伯德极地与气候研究中心）
Remote sensing of the Earth's surface water is critical in a wide range of environmental studies, from evaluating the societal impacts of seasonal droughts and floods to the large-scale implications of climate change. Consequently, a large literature exists on the classification of water from satellite imagery. Yet, previous methods have been limited by 1) the spatial resolution of public satellite imagery, 2) classification schemes that operate at the pixel level, and 3) the need for multiple spectral bands. We advance the state-of-the-art by 1) using commercial imagery with panchromatic and …
Ford AV LLC（福特自动驾驶有限责任公司）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）
This paper presents a localization technique using aerial imagery maps and LIDAR based ground reflectivity for autonomous vehicles in urban environments. Traditional localization techniques using LIDAR reflectivity rely on high definition reflectivity maps generated from a mapping vehicle. The cost and effort required to maintain such prior maps are generally very high because it requires a fleet of expensive mapping vehicles. In this work we propose a localization technique where the vehicle localizes using aerial/satellite imagery, eradicating the need to develop and maintain complex high-de…
This paper presents an automated pipeline for processing multi-view satellite images to 3D digital surface models (DSM). The proposed pipeline performs automated geo-referencing and generates high-quality densely matched point clouds. In particular, a novel approach is developed that fuses multiple depth maps derived by stereo matching to generate high-quality 3D maps. By learning critical configurations of stereo pairs from sample LiDAR data, we rank the image pairs based on the proximity of the results to the sample data. Multiple depth maps derived from individual image pairs are fused with…
A Deep Learning Approach to Estimate Canopy Height and Uncertainty by Integrating Seasonal Optical, SAR and Limited GEDI LiDAR Data over Northern Forests
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）
In this work, we present LocGAN, our localization approach based on a geo-referenced aerial imagery and LiDAR grid maps. Currently, most self-localization approaches relate the current sensor observations to a map generated from previously acquired data. Unfortunately, this data is not always available and the generated maps are usually sensor setup specific. Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) can overcome this problem. However, they are not always reliable especially in urban areas due to multi-path and shadowing effects. Since aerial imagery is usually available, we can use it as pri…
ONERA, The French Aerospace Lab（法国航空航天研究院）；Univ. Bretagne-Sud, UMR 6074, IRISA（南布列塔尼大学，IRISA）
In this work, we investigate the use of OpenStreetMap data for semantic labeling of Earth Observation images. Deep neural networks have been used in the past for remote sensing data classification from various sensors, including multispectral, hyperspectral, SAR and LiDAR data. While OpenStreetMap has already been used as ground truth data for training such networks, this abundant data source remains rarely exploited as an input information layer. In this paper, we study different use cases and deep network architectures to leverage OpenStreetMap data for semantic labeling of aerial and satell…
