Learning from multiple sensors is challenging due to spatio-temporal misalignment and differences in resolution and captured spectra. To that end, we introduce GeoWATCH, a flexible framework for training models on long sequences of satellite images sourced from multiple sensor platforms, which is designed to handle image classification, activity recognition, object detection, or object tracking tasks. Our system includes a novel partial weight loading mechanism based on sub-graph isomorphism which allows for continually training and modifying a network over many training cycles. This has allowed us to train a lineage of models over a long period of time, which we have observed has improved performance as we adjust configurations while maintaining a core backbone.
Timely disaster risk management requires accurate road maps and prompt damage assessment. Currently, this is done by volunteers manually marking satellite imagery of affected areas but this process is slow and often error-prone. Segmentation algorithms can be applied to satellite images to detect road networks. However, existing methods are unsuitable for disaster-struck areas as they make assumptions about the road network topology which may no longer be valid in these scenarios. Herein, we propose a CNN-based framework for identifying accessible roads in post-disaster imagery by detecting ch…
Detecting changes on the Earth, such as urban development, deforestation, or natural disaster, is one of the research fields that is attracting a great deal of attention. One promising tool to solve these problems is satellite imagery. However, satellite images require huge amount of storage, therefore users are required to set Area of Interests first, which was not suitable for detecting potential areas for disaster or development. To tackle with this problem, we develop the novel tool, namely GRASP EARTH, which is the simple change detection application based on Google Earth Engine. GRASP EA…
In this work, we compare the detection accuracy and speed of several state-of-the-art models for the task of detecting oil and gas fracking wells and small cars in commercial electro-optical satellite imagery. Several models are studied from the single-stage, two-stage, and multi-stage object detection families of techniques. For the detection of fracking well pads (50m - 250m), we find single-stage detectors provide superior prediction speed while also matching detection performance of their two and multi-stage counterparts. However, for detecting small cars, two-stage and multi-stage models …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；The California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
This paper introduces a new, highly consequential setting for the use of computer vision for environmental sustainability. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) (aka intensive livestock farms or "factory farms") produce significant manure and pollution. Dumping manure in the winter months poses significant environmental risks and violates environmental law in many states. Yet the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state agencies have relied primarily on self-reporting to monitor such instances of "land application." Our paper makes four contributions. First, we introduc…
Andalusian Research Institute in Data Science and Computational Intelligence, University of Granada（格拉纳达大学安达卢西亚数据科学与计算智能研究所）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；Andalusian Research Institute in Data Science and Computational Intelligence（安达卢西亚数据科学与计算智能研究所）
The detection of critical infrastructures in large territories represented by aerial and satellite images is of high importance in several fields such as in security, anomaly detection, land use planning and land use change detection. However, the detection of such infrastructures is complex as they have highly variable shapes and sizes, i.e., some infrastructures, such as electrical substations, are too small while others, such as airports, are too large. Besides, airports can have a surface area either small or too large with completely different shapes, which makes its correct detection cha…
Geoinformatics Center, Asian Institute of Technology（亚洲理工学院地理信息学中心）
In many applications of aerial/satellite image analysis (remote sensing), the generation of exact shapes of objects is a cumbersome task. In most remote sensing applications such as counting objects requires only location estimation of objects. Hence, locating object centroids in aerial/satellite images is an easy solution for tasks where the object's exact shape is not necessary. Thus, this study focuses on assessing the feasibility of using deep neural networks for locating object centroids in satellite images. Name of our model is Centroid-UNet. The Centroid-UNet model is based on classic U…
Identifying the locations and footprints of buildings is vital for many practical and scientific purposes. Such information can be particularly useful in developing regions where alternative data sources may be scarce. In this work, we describe a model training pipeline for detecting buildings across the entire continent of Africa, using 50 cm satellite imagery. Starting with the U-Net model, widely used in satellite image analysis, we study variations in architecture, loss functions, regularization, pre-training, self-training and post-processing that increase instance segmentation performanc…
School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学自动化学院）
Oriented object detection in remote sensing images has made great progress in recent years. However, most of the current methods only focus on detecting targets, and cannot distinguish fine-grained objects well in complex scenes. In this technical report, we analyzed the key issues of fine-grained object recognition, and use an oriented feature alignment network (OFA-Net) to achieve high-performance fine-grained oriented object recognition in optical remote sensing images. OFA-Net achieves accurate object localization through a rotated bounding boxes refinement module. On this basis, the bound…
Detecting moving objects from ground-based videos is commonly achieved by using background subtraction techniques. Low-rank matrix decomposition inspires a set of state-of-the-art approaches for this task. It is integrated with structured sparsity regularization to achieve background subtraction in the developed method of Low-rank and Structured Sparse Decomposition (LSD). However, when this method is applied to satellite videos where spatial resolution is poor and targets' contrast to the background is low, its performance is limited as the data no longer fits adequately either the foreground…
Detecting and identifying objects in satellite images is a very challenging task: objects of interest are often very small and features can be difficult to recognize even using very high resolution imagery. For most applications, this translates into a trade-off between recall and precision. We present here a dedicated method to detect and identify aircraft, combining two very different convolutional neural networks (CNNs): a segmentation model, based on a modified U-net architecture, and a detection model, based on the RetinaNet architecture. The results we present show that this combination …
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.
This paper presents an aligned multi-temporal and multi-resolution satellite image dataset for research in change detection. We expect our dataset to be useful to researchers who want to fuse information from multiple satellites for detecting changes on the surface of the earth that may not be fully visible in any single satellite. The dataset we present was created by augmenting the SpaceNet-7 dataset with temporally parallel stacks of Landsat and Sentinel images. The SpaceNet-7 dataset consists of time-sequenced Planet images recorded over 101 AOIs (Areas-of-Interest). In our dataset, for ea…
RS-YOLOX: A High Precision Detector for Object Detection in Satellite Remote Sensing Images
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University（云南大学信息科学与工程学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Computing（云南省智能系统与计算重点实验室）
Detecting small objects over large areas remains a significant challenge in satellite imagery analytics. Among the challenges is the sheer number of pixels and geographical extent per image: a single DigitalGlobe satellite image encompasses over 64 km2 and over 250 million pixels. Another challenge is that objects of interest are often minuscule (~pixels in extent even for the highest resolution imagery), which complicates traditional computer vision techniques. To address these issues, we propose a pipeline (SIMRDWN) that evaluates satellite images of arbitrarily large size at native resoluti…
In recent years, the satellite videos have been captured by a moving satellite platform. In contrast to consumer, movie, and common surveillance videos, satellite video can record the snapshot of the city-scale scene. In a broad field-of-view of satellite videos, each moving target would be very tiny and usually composed of several pixels in frames. Even worse, the noise signals also existed in the video frames, since the background of the video frame has the subpixel-level and uneven moving thanks to the motion of satellites. We argue that this is a new type of computer vision task since prev…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）
Detecting changes on the ground in multitemporal Earth observation data is one of the key problems in remote sensing. In this paper, we introduce Sibling Regression for Optical Change detection (SiROC), an unsupervised method for change detection in optical satellite images with medium and high resolution. SiROC is a spatial context-based method that models a pixel as a linear combination of its distant neighbors. It uses this model to analyze differences in the pixel and its spatial context-based predictions in subsequent time periods for change detection. We combine this spatial context-base…
\begin{abstract} The advent of multitemporal high resolution data, like the Copernicus Sentinel-2, has enhanced significantly the potential of monitoring the earth's surface and environmental dynamics. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning framework for urban change detection which combines state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks (similar to U-Net) for feature representation and powerful recurrent networks (such as LSTMs) for temporal modeling. We report our results on the recently publicly available bi-temporal Onera Satellite Change Detection (OSCD) Sentinel-2 dataset, enhanc…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Satellite video cameras can provide continuous observation for a large-scale area, which is important for many remote sensing applications. However, achieving moving object detection and tracking in satellite videos remains challenging due to the insufficient appearance information of objects and lack of high-quality datasets. In this paper, we first build a large-scale satellite video dataset with rich annotations for the task of moving object detection and tracking. This dataset is collected by the Jilin-1 satellite constellation and composed of 47 high-quality videos with 1,646,038 instance…
Remote Sensing Images from satellites have been used in various domains for detecting and understanding structures on the ground surface. In this work, satellite images were used for localizing parking spaces and vehicles in parking lots for a given parcel using an RCNN based Neural Network Architectures. Parcel shapefiles and raster images from USGS image archive were used for developing images for both training and testing. Feature Pyramid based Mask RCNN yields average class accuracy of 97.56% for both parking spaces and vehicles
Globally 800 million people live within 100 km of a volcano and currently 1500 volcanoes are considered active, but half of these have no ground-based monitoring. Alternatively, satellite radar (InSAR) can be employed to observe volcanic ground deformation, which has shown a significant statistical link to eruptions. Modern satellites provide large coverage with high resolution signals, leading to huge amounts of data. The explosion in data has brought major challenges associated with timely dissemination of information and distinguishing volcano deformation patterns from noise, which currentl…
The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Amazon Lab126（亚马逊Lab126）；Accuweather Inc.（Accuweather公司）；University of Almería（阿尔梅里亚大学）
Meteorologists use shapes and movements of clouds in satellite images as indicators of several major types of severe storms. Satellite imaginary data are in increasingly higher resolution, both spatially and temporally, making it impossible for humans to fully leverage the data in their forecast. Automatic satellite imagery analysis methods that can find storm-related cloud patterns as soon as they are detectable are in demand. We propose a machine learning and pattern recognition based approach to detect "comma-shaped" clouds in satellite images, which are specific cloud distribution patterns…
Detecting Looted Archaeological Sites from Satellite Image Time Series
Iconem（Iconem公司）；DAFA, French archaeological delegation in Afghanistan（法国驻阿富汗考古代表团）；Department of Computer Science, Ecole normale supérieure (ENS-PSL, CNRS, Inria)（巴黎高等师范学院计算机科学系（ENS-PSL、法国国家科学研究中心、法国国家信息与自动化研究所））；Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Data Science, New York University（纽约大学柯朗数学科学研究所与数据科学中心）
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学理论物理研究所）；KP Labs（KP实验室）；European Space Agency（欧洲空间局）；Silesian University of Technology（西里西亚工业大学）
Support vector machines (SVMs) are a well-established classifier effectively deployed in an array of classification tasks. In this work, we consider extending classical SVMs with quantum kernels and applying them to satellite data analysis. The design and implementation of SVMs with quantum kernels (hybrid SVMs) are presented. Here, the pixels are mapped to the Hilbert space using a family of parameterized quantum feature maps (related to quantum kernels). The parameters are optimized to maximize the kernel target alignment. The quantum kernels have been selected such that they enabled analysi…
VME: A Satellite Imagery Dataset and Benchmark for Detecting Vehicles in the Middle East and Beyond
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学科学与工程学院）；Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarland University（萨尔兰大学萨尔兰信息学园区）
Detecting Brick Kiln Infrastructure at Scale: Graph, Foundation, and Remote Sensing Models for Satellite Imagery Data
Planetary Health Informatics (PHI) Lab, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.（行星健康信息学实验室，牛津大学，英国）；Sustainable Environment (FUSE) Lab, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.（可持续环境（FUSE）实验室，香港大学，中国）；School of Computer and IT, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan（计算机与信息技术学院，贝肯豪斯国家大学，巴基斯坦）；Computer Science Department, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan（管理科学大学计算机科学系，拉合尔，巴基斯坦）；Computer Science Department, University of Sarghoda, Sarghoda, Pakistan（计算机科学系，萨尔戈达大学，巴基斯坦）
Crop residue burning is a major source of air pollution in many parts of the world, notably South Asia. Policymakers, practitioners and researchers have invested in both measuring impacts and developing interventions to reduce burning. However, measuring the impacts of burning or the effectiveness of interventions to reduce burning requires data on where burning occurred. These data are challenging to collect in the field, both in terms of cost and feasibility. We take advantage of data from ground-based monitoring of crop residue burning in Punjab, India to explore whether burning can be dete…
Massive amounts of satellite data have been gathered over time, holding the potential to unveil a spatiotemporal chronicle of the surface of Earth. These data allow scientists to investigate various important issues, such as land use changes, on a global scale. However, not all land-use phenomena are equally visible on satellite imagery. In particular, the creation of an inventory of the planet's road infrastructure remains a challenge, despite being crucial to analyze urbanization patterns and their impact. Towards this end, this work advances data-driven approaches for the automatic identifi…
Modeling Complex Object Changes in Satellite Image Time-Series: Approach based on CSP and Spatiotemporal Graph
RIADI Laboratory（RIADI实验室）；National School of Computer Science（国家计算机科学学院）；University of Manouba（马努巴大学）；Robotics and Internet-of-Things Laboratory（机器人与物联网实验室）；Prince Sultan University（苏丹王子大学）
Satellites enable widespread, regional or global surveillance of volcanoes and can provide the first indication of volcanic unrest or eruption. Here we consider Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), which can be employed to detect surface deformation with a strong statistical link to eruption. The ability of machine learning to automatically identify signals of interest in these large InSAR datasets has already been demonstrated, but data-driven techniques, such as convolutional neutral networks (CNN) require balanced training datasets of positive and negative signals to effectivel…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；University of South Australia（南澳大利亚大学）；York University（约克大学）
Data collected by Earth-observing (EO) satellites are often afflicted by cloud cover. Detecting the presence of clouds -- which is increasingly done using deep learning -- is crucial preprocessing in EO applications. In fact, advanced EO satellites perform deep learning-based cloud detection on board the satellites and downlink only clear-sky data to save precious bandwidth. In this paper, we highlight the vulnerability of deep learning-based cloud detection towards adversarial attacks. By optimising an adversarial pattern and superimposing it into a cloudless scene, we bias the neural network…
Mayachitra, Inc.（Mayachitra公司）；UC Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）
Seam carving is a popular technique for content aware image retargeting. It can be used to deliberately manipulate images, for example, change the GPS locations of a building or insert/remove roads in a satellite image. This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting and localizing seams in such images. While there are methods to detect seam carving based manipulations, this is the first time that robust localization and detection of seam carving forgery is made possible. We also propose a seam localization score (SLS) metric to evaluate the effectiveness of localization. The proposed metho…
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）
The large volumes of Sentinel-1 data produced over Europe are being used to develop pan-national ground motion services. However, simple analysis techniques like thresholding cannot detect and classify complex deformation signals reliably making providing usable information to a broad range of non-expert stakeholders a challenge. Here we explore the applicability of deep learning approaches by adapting a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect deformation in a national-scale velocity field. For our proof-of-concept, we focus on the UK where previously identified deformation is…
Institute of Natural and Technical Systems（自然与技术系统研究所）；Sevastopol State University（塞瓦斯托波尔国立大学）
An algorithm and a program for detecting the boundaries of water bodies for the autopilot module of asurface robot are proposed. A method for detecting water objects on satellite maps by the method of finding a color in the HSV color space, using erosion, dilation - methods of digital image filtering is applied.The following operators for constructing contours on the image are investigated: the operators of Sobel,Roberts, Prewitt, and from them the one that detects the boundary more accurately is selected for thismodule. An algorithm for calculating the GPS coordinates of the contours is creat…
Mapping Rio de Janeiro's favelas: general-purpose vs. satellite-specific neural networks
Espace-Dev, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, University of Montpellier, France（Espace-Dev，法国可持续发展国家研究院，蒙彼利埃大学，法国）；Institute of Scientific and Technological Communication and Information in Health, Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil（健康科学与技术通信与信息研究所，菲奥克鲁兹，里约热内卢，巴西）；Department of Geography, University of Brasilia, Brazil（地理系，巴西利亚大学，巴西）；International Joint Laboratory "Sentinela"（国际联合实验室"Sentinela"）
This paper is focused on deriving an optimal image smoother. The optimization is done through the minimization of the norm of the Laplace operator in the image coordinate system. Discretizing the Laplace operator and using the method of Euler-Lagrange result in a weighted average scheme for the optimal smoother. Satellite imagery can be smoothed by this optimal smoother. It is also very fast and can be used for detecting the anomalies in the image. A real anomaly detecting problem is considered for the Qom region in Iran. Satellite image in different bands are smoothed. Comparing the smoothed …
Global surface water detection in very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery can directly serve major applications such as refined flood mapping and water resource assessment. Although achievements have been made in detecting surface water in small-size satellite images corresponding to local geographic scales, datasets and methods suitable for mapping and analyzing global surface water have yet to be explored. To encourage the development of this task and facilitate the implementation of relevant applications, we propose the GLH-water dataset that consists of 250 satellite images and manual…
ICube Lab CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心ICube实验室）；University of Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；Dedan Kimathi University of Technology（德丹·基马蒂科技大学）
The quantization error (QE) from SOM applied on time series of spatial contrast images with variable relative amount of white and dark pixel contents, as in monochromatic medical images or satellite images, is proven a reliable indicator of potentially critical changes in image homogeneity. The QE is shown to increase linearly with the variability in spatial contrast contents across time when contrast intensity is kept constant.
Localizing and counting large ungulates -- hoofed mammals like cows and elk -- in very high-resolution satellite imagery is an important task for supporting ecological studies. Prior work has shown that this is feasible with deep learning based methods and sub-meter multi-spectral satellite imagery. We extend this line of work by proposing a baseline method, CowNet, that simultaneously estimates the number of animals in an image (counts), as well as predicts their location at a pixel level (localizes). We also propose an methodology for evaluating such models on counting and localization tasks…
Nanyang Technological University (NTU)（南洋理工大学）；Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC)（高级数字科学中心）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Ground-based sky cameras (popularly known as Whole Sky Imagers) are increasingly used now-a-days for continuous monitoring of the atmosphere. These imagers have higher temporal and spatial resolutions compared to conventional satellite images. In this paper, we use ground-based sky cameras to detect the onset of rainfall. These images contain additional information about cloud coverage and movement and are therefore useful for accurate rainfall nowcast. We validate our results using rain gauge measurement recordings and achieve an accuracy of 89% for correct detection of rainfall onset.
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…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Detecting and masking cloud and cloud shadow from satellite remote sensing images is a pervasive problem in the remote sensing community. Accurate and efficient detection of cloud and cloud shadow is an essential step to harness the value of remotely sensed data for almost all downstream analysis. DeepMask, a new algorithm for cloud and cloud shadow detection in optical satellite remote sensing imagery, is proposed in this study. DeepMask utilizes ResNet, a deep convolutional neural network, for pixel-level cloud mask generation. The algorithm is trained and evaluated on the Landsat 8 Cloud Co…
DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Kaiserlautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；DLR（德国航空航天中心）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Czech Geological Survey（捷克地质调查局）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus, understanding where these settlements are is of paramount importance to both government and non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), who can use this information to deliver effective social and economic aid. We propose two effective methods for detecting and mapping the locations of informal settlements. One us…
