Segment anything, from space?

Recently, the first foundation model developed specifically for vision tasks was developed, termed the "Segment Anything Model" (SAM). SAM can segment objects in input imagery based upon cheap input prompts, such as one (or more) points, a bounding box, or a mask. The authors examined the zero-shot image segmentation accuracy of SAM on a large number of vision benchmark tasks and found that SAM usually achieved recognition accuracy similar to, or sometimes exceeding, vision models that had been trained on the target tasks. The impressive generalization of SAM for segmentation has major implications for vision researchers working on natural imagery. In this work, we examine whether SAM's impressive performance extends to overhead imagery problems, and help guide the community's response to its development. We examine SAM's performance on a set of diverse and widely-studied benchmark tasks. We find that SAM does often generalize well to overhead imagery, although it fails in some cases due to the unique characteristics of overhead imagery and the target objects. We report on these unique systematic failure cases for remote sensing imagery that may comprise useful future research for the community. Note that this is a working paper, and it will be updated as additional analysis and results are completed.

Meta-Learning for Color-to-Infrared Cross-Modal Style Transfer

Recent object detection models for infrared (IR) imagery are based upon deep neural networks (DNNs) and require large amounts of labeled training imagery. However, publicly-available datasets that can be used for such training are limited in their size and diversity. To address this problem, we explore cross-modal style transfer (CMST) to leverage large and diverse color imagery datasets so that they can be used to train DNN-based IR image based object detectors. We evaluate six contemporary stylization methods on four publicly-available IR datasets - the first comparison of its kind - and find that CMST is highly effective for DNN-based detectors. Surprisingly, we find that existing data-driven methods are outperformed by a simple grayscale stylization (an average of the color channels). Our analysis reveals that existing data-driven methods are either too simplistic or introduce significant artifacts into the imagery. To overcome these limitations, we propose meta-learning style transfer (MLST), which learns a stylization by composing and tuning well-behaved analytic functions. We find that MLST leads to more complex stylizations without introducing significant image artifacts and achieves the best overall detector performance on our benchmark datasets.

Mixture Manifold Networks: A Computationally Efficient Baseline for Inverse Modeling

We propose and show the efficacy of a new method to address generic inverse problems. Inverse modeling is the task whereby one seeks to determine the control parameters of a natural system that produce a given set of observed measurements. Recent work has shown impressive results using deep learning, but we note that there is a trade-off between model performance and computational time. For some applications, the computational time at inference for the best performing inverse modeling method may be overly prohibitive to its use. We present a new method that leverages multiple manifolds as a mixture of backward (e.g., inverse) models in a forward-backward model architecture. These multiple backwards models all share a common forward model, and their training is mitigated by generating training examples from the forward model. The proposed method thus has two innovations: 1) the multiple Manifold Mixture Network (MMN) architecture, and 2) the training procedure involving augmenting backward model training data using the forward model. We demonstrate the advantages of our method by comparing to several baselines on four benchmark inverse problems, and we furthermore provide analysis to motivate its design.

Meta-simulation for the Automated Design of Synthetic Overhead Imagery

The use of synthetic (or simulated) data for training machine learning models has grown rapidly in recent years. Synthetic data can often be generated much faster and more cheaply than its real-world counterpart. One challenge of using synthetic imagery however is scene design: e.g., the choice of content and its features and spatial arrangement. To be effective, this design must not only be realistic, but appropriate for the target domain, which (by assumption) is unlabeled. In this work, we propose an approach to automatically choose the design of synthetic imagery based upon unlabeled real-world imagery. Our approach, termed Neural-Adjoint Meta-Simulation (NAMS), builds upon the seminal recent meta-simulation approaches. In contrast to the current state-of-the-art methods, our approach can be pre-trained once offline, and then provides fast design inference for new target imagery. Using both synthetic and real-world problems, we show that NAMS infers synthetic designs that match both the in-domain and out-of-domain target imagery, and that training segmentation models with NAMS-designed imagery yields superior results compared to na\"ive randomized designs and state-of-the-art meta-simulation methods.

Automated Extraction of Energy Systems Information from Remotely Sensed Data: A Review and Analysis

High quality energy systems information is a crucial input to energy systems research, modeling, and decision-making. Unfortunately, precise information about energy systems is often of limited availability, incomplete, or only accessible for a substantial fee or through a non-disclosure agreement. Recently, remotely sensed data (e.g., satellite imagery, aerial photography) have emerged as a potentially rich source of energy systems information. However, the use of these data is frequently challenged by its sheer volume and complexity, precluding manual analysis. Recent breakthroughs in machine learning have enabled automated and rapid extraction of useful information from remotely sensed data, facilitating large-scale acquisition of critical energy system variables. Here we present a systematic review of the literature on this emerging topic, providing an in-depth survey and review of papers published within the past two decades. We first taxonomize the existing literature into ten major areas, spanning the energy value chain. Within each research area, we distill and critically discuss major features that are relevant to energy researchers, including, for example, key challenges regarding the accessibility and reliability of the methods. We then synthesize our findings to identify limitations and trends in the literature as a whole, and discuss opportunities for innovation.

Inverse deep learning methods and benchmarks for artificial electromagnetic material design

Deep learning (DL) inverse techniques have increased the speed of artificial electromagnetic material (AEM) design and improved the quality of resulting devices. Many DL inverse techniques have succeeded on a number of AEM design tasks, but to compare, contrast, and evaluate assorted techniques it is critical to clarify the underlying ill-posedness of inverse problems. Here we review state-of-the-art approaches and present a comprehensive survey of deep learning inverse methods and invertible and conditional invertible neural networks to AEM design. We produce easily accessible and rapidly implementable AEM design benchmarks, which offers a methodology to efficiently determine the DL technique best suited to solving different design challenges. Our methodology is guided by constraints on repeated simulation and an easily integrated metric, which we propose expresses the relative ill-posedness of any AEM design problem. We show that as the problem becomes increasingly ill-posed, the neural adjoint with boundary loss (NA) generates better solutions faster, regardless of simulation constraints. On simpler AEM design tasks, direct neural networks (NN) fare better when simulations are limited, while geometries predicted by mixture density networks (MDN) and conditional variational auto-encoders (VAE) can improve with continued sampling and re-simulation.

SIMPL: Generating Synthetic Overhead Imagery to Address Zero-shot and Few-Shot Detection Problems

Recently deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved tremendous success for object detection in overhead (e.g., satellite) imagery. One ongoing challenge however is the acquisition of training data, due to high costs of obtaining satellite imagery and annotating objects in it. In this work we present a simple approach - termed Synthetic object IMPLantation (SIMPL) - to easily and rapidly generate large quantities of synthetic overhead training data for custom target objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using SIMPL synthetic imagery for training DNNs in zero-shot scenarios where no real imagery is available; and few-shot learning scenarios, where limited real-world imagery is available. We also conduct experiments to study the sensitivity of SIMPL's effectiveness to some key design parameters, providing users for insights when designing synthetic imagery for custom objects. We release a software implementation of our SIMPL approach so that others can build upon it, or use it for their own custom problems.

Randomized Histogram Matching: A Simple Augmentation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Overhead Imagery

Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve highly accurate results for many recognition tasks on overhead (e.g., satellite) imagery. One challenge however is visual domain shifts (i.e., statistical changes), which can cause the accuracy of DNNs to degrade substantially and unpredictably when tested on new sets of imagery. In this work we model domain shifts caused by variations in imaging hardware, lighting, and other conditions as non-linear pixel-wise transformations; and we show that modern DNNs can become largely invariant to these types of transformations, if provided with appropriate training data augmentation. In general, however, we do not know the transformation between two sets of imagery. To overcome this problem, we propose a simple real-time unsupervised training augmentation technique, termed randomized histogram matching (RHM). We conduct experiments with two large public benchmark datasets for building segmentation and find that RHM consistently yields comparable performance to recent state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation approaches despite being simpler and faster. RHM also offers substantially better performance than other comparably simple approaches that are widely-used in overhead imagery.