Change Detection Using Synthetic Aperture Radar Videos

Many researches have been carried out for change detection using temporal SAR images. In this paper an algorithm for change detection using SAR videos has been proposed. There are various challenges related to SAR videos such as high level of speckle noise, rotation of SAR image frames of the video around a particular axis due to the circular movement of airborne vehicle, non-uniform back scattering of SAR pulses. Hence conventional change detection algorithms used for optical videos and SAR temporal images cannot be directly utilized for SAR videos. We propose an algorithm which is a combination of optical flow calculation using Lucas Kanade (LK) method and blob detection. The developed method follows a four steps approach: image filtering and enhancement, applying LK method, blob analysis and combining LK method with blob analysis. The performance of the developed approach was tested on SAR videos available on Sandia National Laboratories website and SAR videos generated by a SAR simulator.

High Performance Data Engineering Everywhere

The amazing advances being made in the fields of machine and deep learning are a highlight of the Big Data era for both enterprise and research communities. Modern applications require resources beyond a single node's ability to provide. However this is just a small part of the issues facing the overall data processing environment, which must also support a raft of data engineering for pre- and post-data processing, communication, and system integration. An important requirement of data analytics tools is to be able to easily integrate with existing frameworks in a multitude of languages, thereby increasing user productivity and efficiency. All this demands an efficient and highly distributed integrated approach for data processing, yet many of today's popular data analytics tools are unable to satisfy all these requirements at the same time. In this paper we present Cylon, an open-source high performance distributed data processing library that can be seamlessly integrated with existing Big Data and AI/ML frameworks. It is developed with a flexible C++ core on top of a compact data structure and exposes language bindings to C++, Java, and Python. We discuss Cylon's architecture in detail, and reveal how it can be imported as a library to existing applications or operate as a standalone framework. Initial experiments show that Cylon enhances popular tools such as Apache Spark and Dask with major performance improvements for key operations and better component linkages. Finally, we show how its design enables Cylon to be used cross-platform with minimum overhead, which includes popular AI tools such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, and Jupyter notebooks.