Semantic segmentation of satellite imagery is a common approach to identify patterns and detect changes around the planet. Most of the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models are trained in a fully supervised way using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The generalization property of CNN is poor for satellite imagery because the data can be very diverse in terms of landscape types, image resolutions, and scarcity of labels for different geographies and seasons. Hence, the performance of CNN doesn't translate well to images from unseen regions or seasons. Inspired by Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGAN) based approach of image-to-image translation for high-resolution satellite imagery, we propose a CGAN framework for land cover classification using medium-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery. We find that the CGAN model outperforms the CNN model of similar complexity by a significant margin on an unseen imbalanced test dataset.
The Cyprus Institute（塞浦路斯研究所）；National and Kapodistrian University of Athens（雅典国立卡波季斯特里安大学）
In recent years, considerable advancements have been made in the area of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), particularly with the advent of style-based architectures that address many key shortcomings - both in terms of modeling capabilities and network interpretability. Despite these improvements, the adoption of such approaches in the domain of satellite imagery is not straightforward. Typical vision datasets used in generative tasks are well-aligned and annotated, and exhibit limited variability. In contrast, satellite imagery exhibits great spatial and spectral variability, wide prese…
Institute for Applied Computational Science, Harvard University（哈佛大学应用计算科学研究所）；Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab（微软人工智能向善研究实验室）
In this paper we propose a mask-conditional synthetic image generation model for creating synthetic satellite imagery datasets. Given a dataset of real high-resolution images and accompanying land cover masks, we show that it is possible to train an upstream conditional synthetic imagery generator, use that generator to create synthetic imagery with the land cover masks, then train a downstream model on the synthetic imagery and land cover masks that achieves similar test performance to a model that was trained with the real imagery. Further, we find that incorporating a mixture of real and sy…
Intuition Machines Inc（直觉机器公司）；Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology（马克斯·普朗克进化人类学研究所）
Climate change is expected to reshuffle the settlement landscape: forcing people in affected areas to migrate, to change their lifeways, and continuing to affect demographic change throughout the world. Changes to the geographic distribution of population will have dramatic impacts on land use and land cover and thus constitute one of the major challenges of planning for climate change scenarios. In this paper, we explore a generative model framework for generating satellite imagery conditional on gridded population distributions. We make additions to the existing ALAE architecture, creating a…
Generative AI for Urban Planning: Synthesizing Satellite Imagery via Diffusion Models
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology（新加坡-麻省理工学院研究与技术联盟）；Boston University（波士顿大学）
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Nighttime satellite imagery has been applied in a wide range of fields. However, our limited understanding of how observed light intensity is formed and whether it can be simulated greatly hinders its further application. This study explores the potential of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGAN) in translating multispectral imagery to nighttime imagery. A popular cGAN framework, pix2pix, was adopted and modified to facilitate this translation using gridded training image pairs derived from Landsat 8 and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The results of this study p…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）
We propose a machine learning based approach for automatic 3D building reconstruction and vectorization. Taking a single-channel photogrammetric digital surface model (DSM) and panchromatic (PAN) image as input, we first filter out non-building objects and refine the building shapes of input DSM with a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). The refined DSM and the input PAN image are then used through a semantic segmentation network to detect edges and corners of building roofs. Later, a set of vectorization algorithms are proposed to build roof polygons. Finally, the height inform…
This paper develops a deep-learning framework to synthesize a ground-level view of a location given an overhead image. We propose a novel conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) in which the trained generator generates realistic looking and representative ground-level images using overhead imagery as auxiliary information. The generator is an encoder-decoder network which allows us to compare low- and high-level features as well as their concatenation for encoding the overhead imagery. We also demonstrate how our framework can be used to perform land cover classification by modifying…
Multi-spectral satellite imagery provides valuable data at global scale for many environmental and socio-economic applications. Building supervised machine learning models based on these imagery, however, may require ground reference labels which are not available at global scale. Here, we propose a generative model to produce multi-resolution multi-spectral imagery based on Sentinel-2 data. The resulting synthetic images are indistinguishable from real ones by humans. This technique paves the road for future work to generate labeled synthetic imagery that can be used for data augmentation in …
Urban material recognition in remote sensing imagery is a highly relevant, yet extremely challenging problem due to the difficulty of obtaining human annotations, especially on low resolution satellite images. To this end, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation based approach using adversarial learning. We aim to harvest information from smaller quantities of high resolution data (source domain) and utilize the same to super-resolve low resolution imagery (target domain). This can potentially aid in semantic as well as material label transfer from a richly annotated source to a target do…
This work utilizes a MobileNetV2 Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for fast, mobile detection of satellites, and rejection of stars, in cluttered unresolved space imagery. First, a custom database is created using imagery from a synthetic satellite image program and labeled with bounding boxes over satellites for "satellite-positive" images. The CNN is then trained on this database and the inference is validated by checking the accuracy of the model on an external dataset constructed of real telescope imagery. In doing so, the trained CNN provides a method of rapid satellite identification fo…
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi（德里英迪拉普拉斯塔信息技术学院）；M S Swaminathan Research Foundation（M·S·斯瓦米纳坦研究基金会）
The integration of the modern Machine Learning (ML) models into remote sensing and agriculture has expanded the scope of the application of satellite images in the agriculture domain. In this paper, we present how the accuracy of crop type identification improves as we move from medium-spatiotemporal-resolution (MSTR) to high-spatiotemporal-resolution (HSTR) satellite images. We further demonstrate that high spectral resolution in satellite imagery can improve prediction performance for low spatial and temporal resolutions (LSTR) images. The F1-score is increased by 7% when using multispectral…
In machine learning based single image super-resolution, the degradation model is embedded in training data generation. However, most existing satellite image super-resolution methods use a simple down-sampling model with a fixed kernel to create training images. These methods work fine on synthetic data, but do not perform well on real satellite images. We propose a realistic training data generation model for commercial satellite imagery products, which includes not only the imaging process on satellites but also the post-process on the ground. We also propose a convolutional neural network …
Renewable energy such as solar power is critical to fight the ever more serious climate change. China is the world leading installer of solar panel and numerous solar power plants were built. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning framework named SolarNet which is designed to perform semantic segmentation on large scale satellite imagery data to detect solar farms. SolarNet has successfully mapped 439 solar farms in China, covering near 2000 square kilometers, equivalent to the size of whole Shenzhen city or two and a half of New York city. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first tim…
Fraunhofer Center Machine Learning（弗劳恩霍夫机器学习中心）；University of Kaiserlautern（凯泽斯劳滕大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；CEA Saclay（萨克雷法国原子能和替代能源委员会）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Dresden University of Technology（德累斯顿工业大学）；University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
The recent explosion in applications of machine learning to satellite imagery often rely on visible images and therefore suffer from a lack of data during the night. The gap can be filled by employing available infra-red observations to generate visible images. This work presents how deep learning can be applied successfully to create those images by using U-Net based architectures. The proposed methods show promising results, achieving a structural similarity index (SSIM) up to 86\% on an independent test set and providing visually convincing output images, generated from infra-red observatio…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI)（韩国航空宇宙研究院）
Multi-spectral satellite imaging sensors acquire various spectral band images such as red (R), green (G), blue (B), near-infrared (N), etc. Thanks to the unique spectroscopic property of each spectral band with respective to the objects on the ground, multi-spectral satellite imagery can be used for various geological survey applications. Unfortunately, image artifacts from imaging sensor noises often affect the quality of scenes and have negative impacts on the applications of satellite imagery. Recently, deep learning approaches have been extensively explored for the removal of noises in sat…
Access to high resolution satellite imagery has dramatically increased in recent years as several new constellations have entered service. High revisit frequencies as well as improved resolution has widened the use cases of satellite imagery to areas such as humanitarian relief and even Search and Rescue (SaR). We propose a novel remote sensing object detection dataset for deep learning assisted SaR. This dataset contains only small objects that have been identified as potential targets as part of a live SaR response. We evaluate the application of popular object detection models to this datas…
Google AI（谷歌人工智能）；UN World Food Programme（联合国世界粮食计划署）
In all types of disasters, from earthquakes to armed conflicts, aid workers need accurate and timely data such as damage to buildings and population displacement to mount an effective response. Remote sensing provides this data at an unprecedented scale, but extracting operationalizable information from satellite images is slow and labor-intensive. In this work, we use machine learning to automate the detection of building damage in satellite imagery. We compare the performance of four different convolutional neural network models in detecting damaged buildings in the 2010 Haiti earthquake. We…
Characterizing the processes leading to deforestation is critical to the development and implementation of targeted forest conservation and management policies. In this work, we develop a deep learning model called ForestNet to classify the drivers of primary forest loss in Indonesia, a country with one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. Using satellite imagery, ForestNet identifies the direct drivers of deforestation in forest loss patches of any size. We curate a dataset of Landsat 8 satellite images of known forest loss events paired with driver annotations from expert interpr…
Obtaining detailed and reliable data about local economic livelihoods in developing countries is expensive, and data are consequently scarce. Previous work has shown that it is possible to measure local-level economic livelihoods using high-resolution satellite imagery. However, such imagery is relatively expensive to acquire, often not updated frequently, and is mainly available for recent years. We train CNN models on free and publicly available multispectral daytime satellite images of the African continent from the Landsat 7 satellite, which has collected imagery with global coverage for a…
The sensor to shooter timeline is affected by two main variables: satellite positioning and asset positioning. Speeding up satellite positioning by adding more sensors or by decreasing processing time is important only if there is a prepared shooter, otherwise the main source of time is getting the shooter into position. However, the intelligence community should work towards the exploitation of sensors to the highest speed and effectiveness possible. Achieving a high effectiveness while keeping speed high is a tradeoff that must be considered in the sensor to shooter timeline. In this paper w…
Millions of people worldwide are absent from their country's census. Accurate, current, and granular population metrics are critical to improving government allocation of resources, to measuring disease control, to responding to natural disasters, and to studying any aspect of human life in these communities. Satellite imagery can provide sufficient information to build a population map without the cost and time of a government census. We present two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures which efficiently and effectively combine satellite imagery inputs from multiple sources to accu…
Land use classification of low resolution spatial imagery is one of the most extensively researched fields in remote sensing. Despite significant advancements in satellite technology, high resolution imagery lacks global coverage and can be prohibitively expensive to procure for extended time periods. Accurately classifying land use change without high resolution imagery offers the potential to monitor vital aspects of global development agenda including climate smart agriculture, drought resistant crops, and sustainable land management. Utilizing a combination of capsule layers and long-short…
3D urban reconstruction of buildings from remotely sensed imagery has drawn significant attention during the past two decades. While aerial imagery and LiDAR provide higher resolution, satellite imagery is cheaper and more efficient to acquire for large scale need. However, the high, orbital altitude of satellite observation brings intrinsic challenges, like unpredictable atmospheric effect, multi view angles, significant radiometric differences due to the necessary multiple views, diverse land covers and urban structures in a scene, small base-height ratio or narrow field of view, all of whic…
University of Sannio（桑尼奥大学）；Italian Space Agency（意大利空间局）
In recent years, the growth of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms has raised the number of studies including their applicability in a variety of different scenarios. Among all, one of the hardest ones is the aerospace, due to its peculiar physical requirements. In this context, a feasibility study and a first prototype for an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model to be deployed on board satellites are presented in this work. As a case study, the detection of volcanic eruptions has been investigated as a method to swiftly produce alerts and allow immediate interventions. Two Convolutional Neural Net…
Modern livestock farming is increasingly data driven and frequently relies on efficient remote sensing to gather data over wide areas. High resolution satellite imagery is one such data source, which is becoming more accessible for farmers as coverage increases and cost falls. Such images can be used to detect and track animals, monitor pasture changes, and understand land use. Many of the data driven models being applied to these tasks require ground truthing at resolutions higher than satellites can provide. Simultaneously, there is a lack of available aerial imagery focused on farmland chan…
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have outperformed existing object recognition and detection algorithms. On the other hand satellite imagery captures scenes that are diverse. This paper describes a deep learning approach that analyzes a geo referenced satellite image and efficiently detects built structures in it. A Fully Convolution Network (FCN) is trained on low resolution Google earth satellite imagery in order to achieve end result. The detected built communities are then correlated with the vaccination activity that has furnished some useful statistics.
Mission San Jose High School（米慎圣何塞高中）；Stanford Univeristy（斯坦福大学）
Determining the poverty levels of various regions throughout the world is crucial in identifying interventions for poverty reduction initiatives and directing resources fairly. However, reliable data on global economic livelihoods is hard to come by, especially for areas in the developing world, hampering efforts to both deploy services and monitor/evaluate progress. This is largely due to the fact that this data is obtained from traditional door-to-door surveys, which are time consuming and expensive. Overhead satellite imagery contain characteristics that make it possible to estimate the reg…
Data imbalance is a ubiquitous problem in machine learning. In large scale collected and annotated datasets, data imbalance is either mitigated manually by undersampling frequent classes and oversampling rare classes, or planned for with imputation and augmentation techniques. In both cases balancing data requires labels. In other words, only annotated data can be balanced. Collecting fully annotated datasets is challenging, especially for large scale satellite systems such as the unlabeled NASA's 35 PB Earth Imagery dataset. Although the NASA Earth Imagery dataset is unlabeled, there are impl…
The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Information on urban tree canopies is fundamental to mitigating climate change [1] as well as improving quality of life [2]. Urban tree planting initiatives face a lack of up-to-date data about the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the tree canopy in cities. We present a pipeline that utilizes LiDAR data as ground-truth and then trains a multi-task machine learning model to generate reliable estimates of tree cover and canopy height in urban areas using multi-source multi-spectral satellite imagery for the case study of Chicago.
Multi-channel satellite imagery, from stacked spectral bands or spatiotemporal data, have meaningful representations for various atmospheric properties. Combining these features in an effective manner to create a performant and trustworthy model is of utmost importance to forecasters. Neural networks show promise, yet suffer from unintuitive computations, fusion of high-level features, and may be limited by the quantity of available data. In this work, we leverage the scattering transform to extract high-level features without additional trainable parameters and introduce a separation scheme t…
SRM Institute of Science and Technology（SRM科学技术学院）
The ship-detection task in satellite imagery presents significant obstacles to even the most state of the art segmentation models due to lack of labelled dataset or approaches which are not able to generalize to unseen images. The most common methods for semantic segmentation involve complex two-stage networks or networks which make use of a multi-scale scene parsing module. In this paper, we propose a modified version of the popular U-Net architecture called Squeeze and Excitation U-Net and train it with a loss that helps in directly optimizing the intersection over union (IoU) score. Our met…
Automated road network extraction from remote sensing imagery remains a significant challenge despite its importance in a broad array of applications. To this end, we leverage recent open source advances and the high quality SpaceNet dataset to explore road network extraction at scale, an approach we call City-scale Road Extraction from Satellite Imagery (CRESI). Specifically, we create an algorithm to extract road networks directly from imagery over city-scale regions, which can subsequently be used for routing purposes. We quantify the performance of our algorithm with the APLS and TOPO grap…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Forest carbon offsets are increasingly popular and can play a significant role in financing climate mitigation, forest conservation, and reforestation. Measuring how much carbon is stored in forests is, however, still largely done via expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes unaccountable field measurements. To overcome these limitations, many verification bodies are leveraging machine learning (ML) algorithms to estimate forest carbon from satellite or aerial imagery. Aerial imagery allows for tree species or family classification, which improves the satellite imagery-based forest type classi…
Reconstructing 3D geometry from satellite imagery is an important topic of research. However, disparities exist between how this 3D reconstruction problem is handled in the remote sensing context and how multi-view reconstruction pipelines have been developed in the computer vision community. In this paper, we explore whether state-of-the-art reconstruction pipelines from the vision community can be applied to the satellite imagery. Along the way, we address several challenges adapting vision-based structure from motion and multi-view stereo methods. We show that vision pipelines can offer com…
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…
Gaining timely and reliable situation awareness after hazard events such as a hurricane is crucial to emergency managers and first responders. One effective way to achieve that goal is through damage assessment. Recently, disaster researchers have been utilizing imagery captured through satellites or drones to quantify the number of flooded/damaged buildings. In this paper, we propose a mixed data approach, which leverages publicly available satellite imagery and geolocation features of the affected area to identify damaged buildings after a hurricane. The method demonstrated significant impro…
KidSat: satellite imagery to map childhood poverty dataset and benchmark
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Save the Children, UK（救助儿童会英国分会）
Image resolution is an important criterion for many applications based on satellite imagery. In this work, we adapt a state-of-the-art kernel regression technique for smartphone camera burst super-resolution to satellites. This technique leverages the local structure of the image to optimally steer the fusion kernels, limiting blur in the final high-resolution prediction, denoising the image, and recovering details up to a zoom factor of 2. We extend this approach to the multi-exposure case to predict from a sequence of multi-exposure low-resolution frames a high-resolution and noise-free one.…
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 …
Skolkovo institute of Science and technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）；Moscow（莫斯科）
When major disaster occurs the questions are raised how to estimate the damage in time to support the decision making process and relief efforts by local authorities or humanitarian teams. In this paper we consider the use of Machine Learning and Computer Vision on remote sensing imagery to improve time efficiency of assessment of damaged buildings in disaster affected area. We propose a general workflow that can be useful in various disaster management applications, and demonstrate the use of the proposed workflow for the assessment of the damage caused by the wildfires in California in 2017.
Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab（微软AI向善研究实验室）；World Bank（世界银行）
Innovations in computer vision algorithms for satellite image analysis can enable us to explore global challenges such as urbanization and land use change at the planetary level. However, domain shift problems are a common occurrence when trying to replicate models that drive these analyses to new areas, particularly in the developing world. If a model is trained with imagery and labels from one location, then it usually will not generalize well to new locations where the content of the imagery and data distributions are different. In this work, we consider the setting in which we have a singl…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；National Bureau of Economic Research（国家经济研究局）；AtlasAI（AtlasAI公司）
Accurate and comprehensive measurements of a range of sustainable development outcomes are fundamental inputs into both research and policy. We synthesize the growing literature that uses satellite imagery to understand these outcomes, with a focus on approaches that combine imagery with machine learning. We quantify the paucity of ground data on key human-related outcomes and the growing abundance and resolution (spatial, temporal, and spectral) of satellite imagery. We then review recent machine learning approaches to model-building in the context of scarce and noisy training data, highlight…
Statistics Department, UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校统计系）；Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Department, UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校电气工程与计算机科学系）；Global Policy Laboratory, Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校高盛公共政策学院全球政策实验室）；Center for the Environment and Data Science Initiative, Harvard University（哈佛大学环境中心与数据科学计划）；Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, UC Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校布伦环境科学与管理学院）；Rhodium Group（荣鼎集团）
Combining satellite imagery with machine learning (SIML) has the potential to address global challenges by remotely estimating socioeconomic and environmental conditions in data-poor regions, yet the resource requirements of SIML limit its accessibility and use. We show that a single encoding of satellite imagery can generalize across diverse prediction tasks (e.g. forest cover, house price, road length). Our method achieves accuracy competitive with deep neural networks at orders of magnitude lower computational cost, scales globally, delivers label super-resolution predictions, and facilitat…
In the 21st century, Aerial and satellite images are information rich. They are also complex to analyze. For GIS systems, many features require fast and reliable extraction of open space area from high resolution satellite imagery. In this paper we will study efficient and reliable automatic extraction algorithm to find out the open space area from the high resolution urban satellite imagery. This automatic extraction algorithm uses some filters and segmentations and grouping is applying on satellite images. And the result images may use to calculate the total available open space area and the…
This paper describes our approach to the DSTL Satellite Imagery Feature Detection challenge run by Kaggle. The primary goal of this challenge is accurate semantic segmentation of different classes in satellite imagery. Our approach is based on an adaptation of fully convolutional neural network for multispectral data processing. In addition, we defined several modifications to the training objective and overall training pipeline, e.g. boundary effect estimation, also we discuss usage of data augmentation strategies and reflectance indices. Our solution scored third place out of 419 entries. It…
This paper describes our approach to the DIUx xView 2018 Detection Challenge [1]. This challenge focuses on a new satellite imagery dataset. The dataset contains 60 object classes that are highly imbalanced. Due to the imbalanced nature of the dataset, the training process becomes significantly more challenging. To address this problem, we introduce a novel Reduced Focal Loss function, which brought us 1st place in the DIUx xView 2018 Detection Challenge.
Research Center For Modeling and Simulation (RCMS), NUST（国立科技大学建模与仿真研究中心）；RCMS, NUST（国立科技大学建模与仿真研究中心）
Object detection is one of the fundamental objectives in Applied Computer Vision. In some of the applications, object detection becomes very challenging such as in the case of satellite image processing. Satellite image processing has remained the focus of researchers in domains of Precision Agriculture, Climate Change, Disaster Management, etc. Therefore, object detection in satellite imagery is one of the most researched problems in this domain. This paper focuses on aircraft detection. in satellite imagery using deep learning techniques. In this paper, we used YOLO deep learning framework f…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（产业技术综合研究所）
This paper presents an efficient object detection method from satellite imagery. Among a number of machine learning algorithms, we proposed a combination of two convolutional neural networks (CNN) aimed at high precision and high recall, respectively. We validated our models using golf courses as target objects. The proposed deep learning method demonstrated higher accuracy than previous object identification methods.
University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；Vision Systems Inc.（视觉系统公司）
Digital Surface Model generation from satellite imagery is a difficult task that has been largely overlooked by the deep learning community. Stereo reconstruction techniques developed for terrestrial systems including self driving cars do not translate well to satellite imagery where image pairs vary considerably. In this work we present neural network tailored for Digital Surface Model generation, a ground truthing and training scheme which maximizes available hardware, and we present a comparison to existing methods. The resulting models are smooth, preserve boundaries, and enable further pr…
In this paper a new method of image smoothing for satellite imagery and its applications in environmental remote sensing are presented. This method is based on the global gradient minimization over the whole image. With respect to the image discrete identity, the continuous minimization problem is discretized. Using the finite difference numerical method of differentiation, a simple yet efficient 5*5-pixel template is derived. Convolution of the derived template with the image in different bands results in the discrimination of various image elements. This method is extremely fast, besides bei…
