Evolution of urban areas and land surface temperature

With the global population on the rise, our cities have been expanding to accommodate the growing number of people. The expansion of cities generally leads to the engulfment of peripheral areas. However, such expansion of urban areas is likely to cause increment in areas with increased land surface temperature (LST). By considering each summer as a data point, we form LST multi-year time-series and cluster it to obtain spatio-temporal pattern. We observe several interesting phenomena from these patterns, e.g., some clusters show reasonable similarity to the built-up area, whereas the locations with high temporal variation are seen more in the peripheral areas. Furthermore, the LST center of mass shifts over the years for cities with development activities tilted towards a direction. We conduct the above-mentioned studies for three different cities in three different continents.

Exploring Geometric Deep Learning For Precipitation Nowcasting

Precipitation nowcasting (up to a few hours) remains a challenge due to the highly complex local interactions that need to be captured accurately. Convolutional Neural Networks rely on convolutional kernels convolving with grid data and the extracted features are trapped by limited receptive field, typically expressed in excessively smooth output compared to ground truth. Thus they lack the capacity to model complex spatial relationships among the grids. Geometric deep learning aims to generalize neural network models to non-Euclidean domains. Such models are more flexible in defining nodes and edges and can effectively capture dynamic spatial relationship among geographical grids. Motivated by this, we explore a geometric deep learning-based temporal Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for precipitation nowcasting. The adjacency matrix that simulates the interactions among grid cells is learned automatically by minimizing the L1 loss between prediction and ground truth pixel value during the training procedure. Then, the spatial relationship is refined by GCN layers while the temporal information is extracted by 1D convolution with various kernel lengths. The neighboring information is fed as auxiliary input layers to improve the final result. We test the model on sequences of radar reflectivity maps over the Trento/Italy area. The results show that GCNs improves the effectiveness of modeling the local details of the cloud profile as well as the prediction accuracy by achieving decreased error measures.

Deep Unsupervised Learning for 3D ALS Point Clouds Change Detection

Change detection from traditional optical images has limited capability to model the changes in the height or shape of objects. Change detection using 3D point cloud aerial LiDAR survey data can fill this gap by providing critical depth information. While most existing machine learning based 3D point cloud change detection methods are supervised, they severely depend on the availability of annotated training data, which is in practice a critical point. To circumnavigate this dependence, we propose an unsupervised 3D point cloud change detection method mainly based on self-supervised learning using deep clustering and contrastive learning. The proposed method also relies on an adaptation of deep change vector analysis to 3D point cloud via nearest point comparison. Experiments conducted on a publicly available real dataset show that the proposed method obtains higher performance in comparison to the traditional unsupervised methods, with a gain of about 9% in mean accuracy (to reach more than 85%). Thus, it appears to be a relevant choice in scenario where prior knowledge (labels) is not ensured.

Spatial Context Awareness for Unsupervised Change Detection in Optical Satellite Images

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-based change detection with ensembling over mutually exclusive neighborhoods and transitioning from pixel to object-level changes with morphological operations. SiROC achieves competitive performance for change detection with medium-resolution Sentinel-2 and high-resolution Planetscope imagery on four datasets. Besides accurate predictions without the need for training, SiROC also provides a well-calibrated uncertainty of its predictions. This makes the method especially useful in conjunction with deep-learning based methods for applications such as pseudo-labeling.

Reiterative Domain Aware Multi-target Adaptation

Most domain adaptation methods focus on single-source-single-target adaptation setting. Multi-target domain adaptation is a powerful extension in which a single classifier is learned for multiple unlabeled target domains. To build a multi-target classifier, it is crucial to effectively aggregate features from the labeled source and different unlabeled target domains. Towards this, recently introduced Domain-aware Curriculum Graph Co-Teaching (D-CGCT) exploits dual classifier head, one of which is based on the graph neural network. D-CGCT uses a sequential adaptation strategy that adapts one domain at a time starting from the target domains that are more similar to the source, assuming that the network finds it easier to adapt to such target domains. However, we argue that there is no easier domain or difficult domain in absolute sense and each domain can have samples showing different characteristics. Following this cue, we propose Reiterative D-CGCT (RD-CGCT) that obtains better adaptation performance by reiterating multiple times over each target domain, while keeping the total number of iterations as same. RD-CGCT further improves the adaptation performance by considering more source samples than training samples in the training minibatch. Proposed RD-CGCT significantly improves the performance over D-CGCT for Office-Home and Office31 datasets.

Segmentation of VHR EO Images using Unsupervised Learning

Semantic segmentation is a crucial step in many Earth observation tasks. Large quantity of pixel-level annotation is required to train deep networks for semantic segmentation. Earth observation techniques are applied to varieties of applications and since classes vary widely depending on the applications, therefore, domain knowledge is often required to label Earth observation images, impeding availability of labeled training data in many Earth observation applications. To tackle these challenges, in this paper we propose an unsupervised semantic segmentation method that can be trained using just a single unlabeled scene. Remote sensing scenes are generally large. The proposed method exploits this property to sample smaller patches from the larger scene and uses deep clustering and contrastive learning to refine the weights of a lightweight deep model composed of a series of the convolution layers along with an embedded channel attention. After unsupervised training on the target image/scene, the model automatically segregates the major classes present in the scene and produces the segmentation map. Experimental results on the Vaihingen dataset demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

Generative modeling of spatio-temporal weather patterns with extreme event conditioning

Deep generative models are increasingly used to gain insights in the geospatial data domain, e.g., for climate data. However, most existing approaches work with temporal snapshots or assume 1D time-series; few are able to capture spatio-temporal processes simultaneously. Beyond this, Earth-systems data often exhibit highly irregular and complex patterns, for example caused by extreme weather events. Because of climate change, these phenomena are only increasing in frequency. Here, we proposed a novel GAN-based approach for generating spatio-temporal weather patterns conditioned on detected extreme events. Our approach augments GAN generator and discriminator with an encoded extreme weather event segmentation mask. These segmentation masks can be created from raw input using existing event detection frameworks. As such, our approach is highly modular and can be combined with custom GAN architectures. We highlight the applicability of our proposed approach in experiments with real-world surface radiation and zonal wind data.

Out-of-distribution detection in satellite image classification

In satellite image analysis, distributional mismatch between the training and test data may arise due to several reasons, including unseen classes in the test data and differences in the geographic area. Deep learning based models may behave in unexpected manner when subjected to test data that has such distributional shifts from the training data, also called out-of-distribution (OOD) examples. Predictive uncertainly analysis is an emerging research topic which has not been explored much in context of satellite image analysis. Towards this, we adopt a Dirichlet Prior Network based model to quantify distributional uncertainty of deep learning models for remote sensing. The approach seeks to maximize the representation gap between the in-domain and OOD examples for a better identification of unknown examples at test time. Experimental results on three exemplary test scenarios show the efficacy of the model in satellite image analysis.

Trusting small training dataset for supervised change detection

Deep learning (DL) based supervised change detection (CD) models require large labeled training data. Due to the difficulty of collecting labeled multi-temporal data, unsupervised methods are preferred in the CD literature. However, unsupervised methods cannot fully exploit the potentials of data-driven deep learning and thus they are not absolute alternative to the supervised methods. This motivates us to look deeper into the supervised DL methods and investigate how they can be adopted intelligently for CD by minimizing the requirement of labeled training data. Towards this, in this work we show that geographically diverse training dataset can yield significant improvement over less diverse training datasets of the same size. We propose a simple confidence indicator for verifying the trustworthiness/confidence of supervised models trained with small labeled dataset. Moreover, we show that for the test cases where supervised CD model is found to be less confident/trustworthy, unsupervised methods often produce better result than the supervised ones.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Band Selection in Hyperspectral Image Classification

Band selection refers to the process of choosing the most relevant bands in a hyperspectral image. By selecting a limited number of optimal bands, we aim at speeding up model training, improving accuracy, or both. It reduces redundancy among spectral bands while trying to preserve the original information of the image. By now many efforts have been made to develop unsupervised band selection approaches, of which the majority are heuristic algorithms devised by trial and error. In this paper, we are interested in training an intelligent agent that, given a hyperspectral image, is capable of automatically learning policy to select an optimal band subset without any hand-engineered reasoning. To this end, we frame the problem of unsupervised band selection as a Markov decision process, propose an effective method to parameterize it, and finally solve the problem by deep reinforcement learning. Once the agent is trained, it learns a band-selection policy that guides the agent to sequentially select bands by fully exploiting the hyperspectral image and previously picked bands. Furthermore, we propose two different reward schemes for the environment simulation of deep reinforcement learning and compare them in experiments. This, to the best of our knowledge, is the first study that explores a deep reinforcement learning model for hyperspectral image analysis, thus opening a new door for future research and showcasing the great potential of deep reinforcement learning in remote sensing applications. Extensive experiments are carried out on four hyperspectral data sets, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.