SolarPanel Segmentation :Self-Supervised Learning for Imperfect Datasets

The increasing adoption of solar energy necessitates advanced methodologies for monitoring and maintenance to ensure optimal performance of solar panel installations. A critical component in this context is the accurate segmentation of solar panels from aerial or satellite imagery, which is essential for identifying operational issues and assessing efficiency. This paper addresses the significant challenges in panel segmentation, particularly the scarcity of annotated data and the labour-intensive nature of manual annotation for supervised learning. We explore and apply Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) to solve these challenges. We demonstrate that SSL significantly enhances model generalization under various conditions and reduces dependency on manually annotated data, paving the way for robust and adaptable solar panel segmentation solutions.

There Are No Data Like More Data- Datasets for Deep Learning in Earth Observation

Carefully curated and annotated datasets are the foundation of machine learning, with particularly data-hungry deep neural networks forming the core of what is often called Artificial Intelligence (AI). Due to the massive success of deep learning applied to Earth Observation (EO) problems, the focus of the community has been largely on the development of ever-more sophisticated deep neural network architectures and training strategies largely ignoring the overall importance of datasets. For that purpose, numerous task-specific datasets have been created that were largely ignored by previously published review articles on AI for Earth observation. With this article, we want to change the perspective and put machine learning datasets dedicated to Earth observation data and applications into the spotlight. Based on a review of the historical developments, currently available resources are described and a perspective for future developments is formed. We hope to contribute to an understanding that the nature of our data is what distinguishes the Earth observation community from many other communities that apply deep learning techniques to image data, and that a detailed understanding of EO data peculiarities is among the core competencies of our discipline.

Cross-Geography Generalization of Machine Learning Methods for Classification of Flooded Regions in Aerial Images

Identification of regions affected by floods is a crucial piece of information required for better planning and management of post-disaster relief and rescue efforts. Traditionally, remote sensing images are analysed to identify the extent of damage caused by flooding. The data acquired from sensors onboard earth observation satellites are analyzed to detect the flooded regions, which can be affected by low spatial and temporal resolution. However, in recent years, the images acquired from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have also been utilized to assess post-disaster damage. Indeed, a UAV based platform can be rapidly deployed with a customized flight plan and minimum dependence on the ground infrastructure. This work proposes two approaches for identifying flooded regions in UAV aerial images. The first approach utilizes texture-based unsupervised segmentation to detect flooded areas, while the second uses an artificial neural network on the texture features to classify images as flooded and non-flooded. Unlike the existing works where the models are trained and tested on images of the same geographical regions, this work studies the performance of the proposed model in identifying flooded regions across geographical regions. An F1-score of 0.89 is obtained using the proposed segmentation-based approach which is higher than existing classifiers. The robustness of the proposed approach demonstrates that it can be utilized to identify flooded regions of any region with minimum or no user intervention.

Enhanced Vehicle Re-identification for ITS: A Feature Fusion approach using Deep Learning

In recent years, the development of robust Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is tackled across the globe to provide better traffic efficiency by reducing frequent traffic problems. As an application of ITS, vehicle re-identification has gained ample interest in the domain of computer vision and robotics. Convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods are developed to perform vehicle re-identification to address key challenges such as occlusion, illumination change, scale, etc. The advancement of transformers in computer vision has opened an opportunity to explore the re-identification process further to enhance performance. In this paper, a framework is developed to perform the re-identification of vehicles across CCTV cameras. To perform re-identification, the proposed framework fuses the vehicle representation learned using a CNN and a transformer model. The framework is tested on a dataset that contains 81 unique vehicle identities observed across 20 CCTV cameras. From the experiments, the fused vehicle re-identification framework yields an mAP of 61.73% which is significantly better when compared with the standalone CNN or transformer model.

Texture based Prototypical Network for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation of Forest Cover: Generalizing for Different Geographical Regions

Forest plays a vital role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating climate change besides maintaining the world's biodiversity. The existing satellite-based forest monitoring system utilizes supervised learning approaches that are limited to a particular region and depend on manually annotated data to identify forest. This work envisages forest identification as a few-shot semantic segmentation task to achieve generalization across different geographical regions. The proposed few-shot segmentation approach incorporates a texture attention module in the prototypical network to highlight the texture features of the forest. Indeed, the forest exhibits a characteristic texture different from other classes, such as road, water, etc. In this work, the proposed approach is trained for identifying tropical forests of South Asia and adapted to determine the temperate forest of Central Europe with the help of a few (one image for 1-shot) manually annotated support images of the temperate forest. An IoU of 0.62 for forest class (1-way 1-shot) was obtained using the proposed method, which is significantly higher (0.46 for PANet) than the existing few-shot semantic segmentation approach. This result demonstrates that the proposed approach can generalize across geographical regions for forest identification, creating an opportunity to develop a global forest cover identification tool.

Contextual Information Based Anomaly Detection for a Multi-Scene UAV Aerial Videos

UAV based surveillance is gaining much interest worldwide due to its extensive applications in monitoring wildlife, urban planning, disaster management, campus security, etc. These videos are analyzed for strange/odd/anomalous patterns which are essential aspects of surveillance. But manual analysis of these videos is tedious and laborious. Hence, the development of computer-aided systems for the analysis of UAV based surveillance videos is crucial. Despite this interest, in literature, several computer aided systems are developed focusing only on CCTV based surveillance videos. These methods are designed for single scene scenarios and lack contextual knowledge which is required for multi-scene scenarios. Furthermore, the lack of standard UAV based anomaly detection datasets limits the development of these systems. In this regard, the present work aims at the development of a Computer Aided Decision support system to analyse UAV based surveillance videos. A new UAV based multi-scene anomaly detection dataset is developed with frame-level annotations for the development of computer aided systems. It holistically uses contextual, temporal and appearance features for accurate detection of anomalies. Furthermore, a new inference strategy is proposed that utilizes few anomalous samples along with normal samples to identify better decision boundaries. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on the UAV based anomaly detection dataset and performed competitively with respect to state-of-the-art methods.

Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty and Robustness to Distributional Shift Using Real World Data

Most machine learning models operate under the assumption that the training, testing and deployment data is independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). This assumption doesn't generally hold true in a natural setting. Usually, the deployment data is subject to various types of distributional shifts. The magnitude of a model's performance is proportional to this shift in the distribution of the dataset. Thus it becomes necessary to evaluate a model's uncertainty and robustness to distributional shifts to get a realistic estimate of its expected performance on real-world data. Present methods to evaluate uncertainty and model's robustness are lacking and often fail to paint the full picture. Moreover, most analysis so far has primarily focused on classification tasks. In this paper, we propose more insightful metrics for general regression tasks using the Shifts Weather Prediction Dataset. We also present an evaluation of the baseline methods using these metrics.

BERT based Transformers lead the way in Extraction of Health Information from Social Media

This paper describes our submissions for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H)2021 shared tasks. We participated in 2 tasks:(1) Classification, extraction and normalization of adverse drug effect (ADE) mentions in English tweets (Task-1) and (2) Classification of COVID-19 tweets containing symptoms(Task-6). Our approach for the first task uses the language representation model RoBERTa with a binary classification head. For the second task, we use BERTweet, based on RoBERTa. Fine-tuning is performed on the pre-trained models for both tasks. The models are placed on top of a custom domain-specific processing pipeline. Our system ranked first among all the submissions for subtask-1(a) with an F1-score of 61%. For subtask-1(b), our system obtained an F1-score of 50% with improvements up to +8% F1 over the score averaged across all submissions. The BERTweet model achieved an F1 score of 94% on SMM4H 2021 Task-6.

UVid-Net: Enhanced Semantic Segmentation of UAV Aerial Videos by Embedding Temporal Information

Semantic segmentation of aerial videos has been extensively used for decision making in monitoring environmental changes, urban planning, and disaster management. The reliability of these decision support systems is dependent on the accuracy of the video semantic segmentation algorithms. The existing CNN based video semantic segmentation methods have enhanced the image semantic segmentation methods by incorporating an additional module such as LSTM or optical flow for computing temporal dynamics of the video which is a computational overhead. The proposed research work modifies the CNN architecture by incorporating temporal information to improve the efficiency of video semantic segmentation. In this work, an enhanced encoder-decoder based CNN architecture (UVid-Net) is proposed for UAV video semantic segmentation. The encoder of the proposed architecture embeds temporal information for temporally consistent labelling. The decoder is enhanced by introducing the feature retainer module, which aids in the accurate localization of the class labels. The proposed UVid-Net architecture for UAV video semantic segmentation is quantitatively evaluated on an extended ManipalUAVid dataset. The performance metric mIoU of 0.79 has been observed which is significantly greater than the other state-of-the-art algorithms. Further, the proposed work produced promising results even for the pre-trained model of UVid-Net on the urban street scene with fine-tuning the final layer on UAV aerial videos.

Weed Density and Distribution Estimation for Precision Agriculture using Semi-Supervised Learning

Uncontrolled growth of weeds can severely affect the crop yield and quality. Unrestricted use of herbicide for weed removal alters biodiversity and cause environmental pollution. Instead, identifying weed-infested regions can aid selective chemical treatment of these regions. Advances in analyzing farm images have resulted in solutions to identify weed plants. However, a majority of these approaches are based on supervised learning methods which requires huge amount of manually annotated images. As a result, these supervised approaches are economically infeasible for the individual farmer because of the wide variety of plant species being cultivated. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based semi-supervised approach for robust estimation of weed density and distribution across farmlands using only limited color images acquired from autonomous robots. This weed density and distribution can be useful in a site-specific weed management system for selective treatment of infected areas using autonomous robots. In this work, the foreground vegetation pixels containing crops and weeds are first identified using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based unsupervised segmentation. Subsequently, the weed infected regions are identified using a fine-tuned CNN, eliminating the need for designing hand-crafted features. The approach is validated on two datasets of different crop/weed species (1) Crop Weed Field Image Dataset (CWFID), which consists of carrot plant images and the (2) Sugar Beets dataset. The proposed method is able to localize weed-infested regions a maximum recall of 0.99 and estimate weed density with a maximum accuracy of 82.13%. Hence, the proposed approach is shown to generalize to different plant species without the need for extensive labeled data.