Scalable Dynamic Origin-Destination Demand Estimation Enhanced by High-Resolution Satellite Imagery Data
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA（土木与环境工程系，卡内基梅隆大学）；Fujitsu Research of America, Pittsburgh, PA（富士通美国研究院）；Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA（Heinz信息学院）
Jiachao Liu, Pablo Guarda, Koichiro Niinuma, Sean Qian
This study presents a novel integrated framework for dynamic origin-destination demand estimation (DODE) in multi-class mesoscopic network models, incorporating high-resolution satellite imagery together with conventional traffic data from local sensors. Unlike sparse local detectors, satellite imagery offers consistent, city-wide road and traffic information of both parking and moving vehicles, overcoming data availability limitations. To extract information from imagery data, we design a computer vision pipeline for class-specific vehicle detection and map matching, generating link-level traffic density observations by vehicle class. Building upon this information, we formulate a computational graph-based DODE framework that calibrates dynamic network states by jointly matching observed traffic counts/speeds from local sensors with density measurements derived from satellite imagery. To assess the accuracy and robustness of the proposed framework, we conduct a series of numerical experiments using both synthetic and real-world data. The results demonstrate that supplementing traditional data with satellite-derived density significantly improves estimation performance, especially for links without local sensors. Real-world experiments also show the framework's potential for practical deployment on large-scale networks. Sensitivity analysis further evaluates the impact of data quality related to satellite imagery data.
High-resolution satellite imagery has proven useful for a broad range of tasks, including measurement of global human population, local economic livelihoods, and biodiversity, among many others. Unfortunately, high-resolution imagery is both infrequently collected and expensive to purchase, making it hard to efficiently and effectively scale these downstream tasks over both time and space. We propose a new conditional pixel synthesis model that uses abundant, low-cost, low-resolution imagery to generate accurate high-resolution imagery at locations and times in which it is unavailable. We show…
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.
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…
A Satellite Imagery Dataset for Long-Term Sustainable Development in United States Cities
University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist)（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心（BNRist））；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
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…
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…
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…
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…
Estimating the Impact of COVID-19 on Travel Demand in Houston Area Using Deep Learning and Satellite Imagery
Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Houston（休斯顿大学土木与环境工程系）；Department of Transportation, Logistics and Finance, North Dakota State University（北达科他州立大学交通、物流与金融系）；School of Traffic and Transportation, Shijiazhuang Tiedao University（石家庄铁道大学交通运输学院）
Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, Rutgers University（计算机与电气工程系，罗格斯大学）；Cloud to Street（云街（Cloud to Street））
Accurate flood detection in near real time via high resolution, high latency satellite imagery is essential to prevent loss of lives by providing quick and actionable information. Instruments and sensors useful for flood detection are only available in low resolution, low latency satellites with region re-visit periods of up to 16 days, making flood alerting systems that use such satellites unreliable. This work presents H2O-Network, a self supervised deep learning method to segment floods from satellites and aerial imagery by bridging domain gap between low and high latency satellite and coar…
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…
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）
Unsupervised pre-training methods for large vision models have shown to enhance performance on downstream supervised tasks. Developing similar techniques for satellite imagery presents significant opportunities as unlabelled data is plentiful and the inherent temporal and multi-spectral structure provides avenues to further improve existing pre-training strategies. In this paper, we present SatMAE, a pre-training framework for temporal or multi-spectral satellite imagery based on Masked Autoencoder (MAE). To leverage temporal information, we include a temporal embedding along with independentl…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术学院）；Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）
For many countries like Russia, Canada, or the USA, a robust and detailed tree species inventory is essential to manage their forests sustainably. Since one can not apply unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery-based approaches to large-scale forest inventory applications, the utilization of machine learning algorithms on satellite imagery is a rising topic of research. Although satellite imagery quality is relatively low, additional spectral channels provide a sufficient amount of information for tree crown classification tasks. Assuming that tree crowns are detected already, we use embeddings …
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 …
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…
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…
Using Game Engines and Machine Learning to Create Synthetic Satellite Imagery for a Tabletop Verification Exercise
Berliner Hochschule für Technik（柏林技术应用科学大学）；Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University（普林斯顿大学科学与全球安全项目）；Einstein Center Digital Future, Berlin（柏林爱因斯坦数字未来中心）
Post-hurricane damage assessment is crucial towards managing resource allocations and executing an effective response. Traditionally, this evaluation is performed through field reconnaissance, which is slow, hazardous, and arduous. Instead, in this paper we furthered the idea of implementing deep learning through convolutional neural networks in order to classify post-hurricane satellite imagery of buildings as Flooded/Damaged or Undamaged. The experimentation was conducted employing a dataset containing post-hurricane satellite imagery from the Greater Houston area after Hurricane Harvey in 2…
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…
The earth observation industry provides satellite imagery with high spatial resolution and short revisit time. To allow efficient operational employment of these images, automating certain tasks has become necessary. In the defense domain, aircraft detection on satellite imagery is a valuable tool for analysts. Obtaining high performance detectors on such a task can only be achieved by leveraging deep learning and thus us-ing a large amount of labeled data. To obtain labels of a high enough quality, the knowledge of military experts is needed.We propose a hybrid clustering active learning meth…
This study presents a new visualization tool for classification of satellite imagery. Visualization of feature space allows exploration of patterns in the image data and insight into the classification process and related uncertainty. Visual Data Mining provides added value to image classifications as the user can be involved in the classification process providing increased confidence in and understanding of the results. In this study, we present a prototype visualization tool for visual data mining (VDM) of satellite imagery. The visualization tool is showcased in a classification study of h…
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 …
SI Analytics；NVIDIA（英伟达）；National Institute of Meteorological Sciences (NIMS)（国家气象科学研究所）
Geostationary satellite imagery has applications in climate and weather forecasting, planning natural energy resources, and predicting extreme weather events. For precise and accurate prediction, higher spatial and temporal resolution of geostationary satellite imagery is important. Although recent geostationary satellite resolution has improved, the long-term analysis of climate applications is limited to using multiple satellites from the past to the present due to the different resolutions. To solve this problem, we proposed warp and refine network (WR-Net). WR-Net is divided into an optica…
Cloud motion winds (CMW) are routinely derived by tracking features in sequential geostationary satellite infrared cloud imagery. In this paper, we explore the cloud motion winds algorithm based on data-driven deep learning approach, and different from conventional hand-craft feature tracking and correlation matching algorithms, we use deep learning model to automatically learn the motion feature representations and directly output the field of cloud motion winds. In addition, we propose a novel large-scale cloud motion winds dataset (CMWD) for training deep learning models. We also try to use…
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…
There is an increasing demand for software that automatically detects and classifies mobile targets such as airplanes, cars, and ships in satellite imagery. Applications of such automated target recognition (ATR) software include economic forecasting, traffic planning, maritime law enforcement, and disaster response. This paper describes the extension of a convolutional neural network (CNN) for classification to a sliding window algorithm for detection. It is evaluated on mobile targets of the xView dataset, on which it achieves detection and classification accuracies higher than 95%.
Object detection and classification for aircraft are the most important tasks in the satellite image analysis. The success of modern detection and classification methods has been based on machine learning and deep learning. One of the key requirements for those learning processes is huge data to train. However, there is an insufficient portion of aircraft since the targets are on military action and oper- ation. Considering the characteristics of satellite imagery, this paper attempts to provide a framework of the simulated and unsupervised methodology without any additional su- pervision or p…
Detection of small objects in large swaths of imagery is one of the primary problems in satellite imagery analytics. While object detection in ground-based imagery has benefited from research into new deep learning approaches, transitioning such technology to overhead imagery is nontrivial. Among the challenges is the sheer number of pixels and geographic extent per image: a single DigitalGlobe satellite image encompasses >64 km2 and over 250 million pixels. Another challenge is that objects of interest are minuscule (often only ~10 pixels in extent), which complicates traditional computer vis…
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 Generati…
Orion Lab, National Observatory of Athens & National Technical University of Athens（Orion实验室、雅典国家天文观测站及雅典技术大学）；Department of Informatics and Telematics, Harokopio University of Athens（信息与电信系、哈罗基奥大学）
Massachusetts Institue of Technology（麻省理工学院）；WL Research
Automatic change detection and disaster damage assessment are currently procedures requiring a huge amount of labor and manual work by satellite imagery analysts. In the occurrences of natural disasters, timely change detection can save lives. In this work, we report findings on problem framing, data processing and training procedures which are specifically helpful for the task of building damage assessment using the newly released xBD dataset. Our insights lead to substantial improvement over the xBD baseline models, and we score among top results on the xView2 challenge leaderboard. We relea…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Lockheed Martin Space（洛克希德·马丁太空公司）
When disaster strikes, accurate situational information and a fast, effective response are critical to save lives. Widely available, high resolution satellite images enable emergency responders to estimate locations, causes, and severity of damage. Quickly and accurately analyzing the extensive amount of satellite imagery available, though, requires an automatic approach. In this paper, we present Siam-U-Net-Attn model - a multi-class deep learning model with an attention mechanism - to assess damage levels of buildings given a pair of satellite images depicting a scene before and after a disa…
The increasing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery has enabled the use of machine learning to support land-cover measurement and inform policy-making. However, labelling satellite images is expensive and is available for only some locations. This prompts the use of transfer learning to adapt models from data-rich locations to others. Given the potential for high-impact applications of satellite imagery across geographies, a systematic assessment of transfer learning implications is warranted. In this work, we consider the task of land-cover segmentation and study the fairness imp…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Lockheed Martin Space（洛克希德·马丁太空）
Automatic building segmentation is an important task for satellite imagery analysis and scene understanding. Most existing segmentation methods focus on the case where the images are taken from directly overhead (i.e., low off-nadir/viewing angle). These methods often fail to provide accurate results on satellite images with larger off-nadir angles due to the higher noise level and lower spatial resolution. In this paper, we propose a method that is able to provide accurate building segmentation for satellite imagery captured from a large range of off-nadir angles. Based on Bayesian deep learn…
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Fast and effective responses are required when a natural disaster (e.g., earthquake, hurricane, etc.) strikes. Building damage assessment from satellite imagery is critical before an effective response is conducted. High-resolution satellite images provide rich information with pre- and post-disaster scenes for analysis. However, most existing works simply use pre- and post-disaster images as input without considering their correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-directional fusion strategy to better explore the correlations between pre- and post-disaster images. Moreover, the da…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Several passive microwave satellites orbit the Earth and measure rainfall. These measurements have the advantage of almost full global coverage when compared to surface rain gauges. However, these satellites have low temporal revisit and missing data over some regions. Image fusion is a useful technique to fill in the gaps of one image (one satellite measurement) using another one. The proposed algorithm uses an iterative fusion scheme to integrate information from two satellite measurements. The algorithm is implemented on two datasets for 7 years of half-hourly data. The results show signifi…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Software Engineering Institute（软件工程研究所）；Defense Innovation Unit（国防创新部门）；Department of Defense（国防部）；CrowdAI, Inc.（CrowdAI公司）
We present xBD, a new, large-scale dataset for the advancement of change detection and building damage assessment for humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery research. Natural disaster response requires an accurate understanding of damaged buildings in an affected region. Current response strategies require in-person damage assessments within 24-48 hours of a disaster. Massive potential exists for using aerial imagery combined with computer vision algorithms to assess damage and reduce the potential danger to human life. In collaboration with multiple disaster response agencies, xBD prov…
