Comparing Satellite Data for Next-Day Wildfire Predictability

Multiple studies have performed next-day fire prediction using satellite imagery. Two main satellites are used to detect wildfires: MODIS and VIIRS. Both satellites provide fire mask products, called MOD14 and VNP14, respectively. Studies have used one or the other, but there has been no comparison between them to determine which might be more suitable for next-day fire prediction. In this paper, we first evaluate how well VIIRS and MODIS data can be used to forecast wildfire spread one day ahead. We find that the model using VIIRS as input and VNP14 as target achieves the best results. Interestingly, the model using MODIS as input and VNP14 as target performs significantly better than using VNP14 as input and MOD14 as target. Next, we discuss why MOD14 might be harder to use for predicting next-day fires. We find that the MOD14 fire mask is highly stochastic and does not correlate with reasonable fire spread patterns. This is detrimental for machine learning tasks, as the model learns irrational patterns. Therefore, we conclude that MOD14 is unsuitable for next-day fire prediction and that VNP14 is a much better option. However, using MODIS input and VNP14 as target, we achieve a significant improvement in predictability. This indicates that an improved fire detection model is possible for MODIS. The full code and dataset is available online: https://github.com/justuskarlsson/wildfire-mod14-vnp14

On the Adversarial Vulnerabilities of Transfer Learning in Remote Sensing

The use of pretrained models from general computer vision tasks is widespread in remote sensing, significantly reducing training costs and improving performance. However, this practice also introduces vulnerabilities to downstream tasks, where publicly available pretrained models can be used as a proxy to compromise downstream models. This paper presents a novel Adversarial Neuron Manipulation method, which generates transferable perturbations by selectively manipulating single or multiple neurons in pretrained models. Unlike existing attacks, this method eliminates the need for domain-specific information, making it more broadly applicable and efficient. By targeting multiple fragile neurons, the perturbations achieve superior attack performance, revealing critical vulnerabilities in deep learning models. Experiments on diverse models and remote sensing datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. This low-access adversarial neuron manipulation technique highlights a significant security risk in transfer learning models, emphasizing the urgent need for more robust defenses in their design when addressing the safety-critical remote sensing tasks.

Sen2Fire: A Challenging Benchmark Dataset for Wildfire Detection using Sentinel Data

Utilizing satellite imagery for wildfire detection presents substantial potential for practical applications. To advance the development of machine learning algorithms in this domain, our study introduces the \textit{Sen2Fire} dataset--a challenging satellite remote sensing dataset tailored for wildfire detection. This dataset is curated from Sentinel-2 multi-spectral data and Sentinel-5P aerosol product, comprising a total of 2466 image patches. Each patch has a size of 512$\times$512 pixels with 13 bands. Given the distinctive sensitivities of various wavebands to wildfire responses, our research focuses on optimizing wildfire detection by evaluating different wavebands and employing a combination of spectral indices, such as normalized burn ratio (NBR) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The results suggest that, in contrast to using all bands for wildfire detection, selecting specific band combinations yields superior performance. Additionally, our study underscores the positive impact of integrating Sentinel-5 aerosol data for wildfire detection. The code and dataset are available online (https://zenodo.org/records/10881058).

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.

Universal Adversarial Defense in Remote Sensing Based on Pre-trained Denoising Diffusion Models

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved tremendous success in many remote sensing (RS) applications, in which DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Unfortunately, current adversarial defense approaches in RS studies usually suffer from performance fluctuation and unnecessary re-training costs due to the need for prior knowledge of the adversarial perturbations among RS data. To circumvent these challenges, we propose a universal adversarial defense approach in RS imagery (UAD-RS) using pre-trained diffusion models to defend the common DNNs against multiple unknown adversarial attacks. Specifically, the generative diffusion models are first pre-trained on different RS datasets to learn generalized representations in various data domains. After that, a universal adversarial purification framework is developed using the forward and reverse process of the pre-trained diffusion models to purify the perturbations from adversarial samples. Furthermore, an adaptive noise level selection (ANLS) mechanism is built to capture the optimal noise level of the diffusion model that can achieve the best purification results closest to the clean samples according to their Frechet Inception Distance (FID) in deep feature space. As a result, only a single pre-trained diffusion model is needed for the universal purification of adversarial samples on each dataset, which significantly alleviates the re-training efforts and maintains high performance without prior knowledge of the adversarial perturbations. Experiments on four heterogeneous RS datasets regarding scene classification and semantic segmentation verify that UAD-RS outperforms state-of-the-art adversarial purification approaches with a universal defense against seven commonly existing adversarial perturbations. Codes and the pre-trained models are available online (https://github.com/EricYu97/UAD-RS).

AI Security for Geoscience and Remote Sensing: Challenges and Future Trends

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have significantly intensified research in the geoscience and remote sensing (RS) field. AI algorithms, especially deep learning-based ones, have been developed and applied widely to RS data analysis. The successful application of AI covers almost all aspects of Earth observation (EO) missions, from low-level vision tasks like super-resolution, denoising, and inpainting, to high-level vision tasks like scene classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. While AI techniques enable researchers to observe and understand the Earth more accurately, the vulnerability and uncertainty of AI models deserve further attention, considering that many geoscience and RS tasks are highly safety-critical. This paper reviews the current development of AI security in the geoscience and RS field, covering the following five important aspects: adversarial attack, backdoor attack, federated learning, uncertainty, and explainability. Moreover, the potential opportunities and trends are discussed to provide insights for future research. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to provide a systematic review of AI security-related research in the geoscience and RS community. Available code and datasets are also listed in the paper to move this vibrant field of research forward.

Backdoor Attacks for Remote Sensing Data with Wavelet Transform

Recent years have witnessed the great success of deep learning algorithms in the geoscience and remote sensing realm. Nevertheless, the security and robustness of deep learning models deserve special attention when addressing safety-critical remote sensing tasks. In this paper, we provide a systematic analysis of backdoor attacks for remote sensing data, where both scene classification and semantic segmentation tasks are considered. While most of the existing backdoor attack algorithms rely on visible triggers like squared patches with well-designed patterns, we propose a novel wavelet transform-based attack (WABA) method, which can achieve invisible attacks by injecting the trigger image into the poisoned image in the low-frequency domain. In this way, the high-frequency information in the trigger image can be filtered out in the attack, resulting in stealthy data poisoning. Despite its simplicity, the proposed method can significantly cheat the current state-of-the-art deep learning models with a high attack success rate. We further analyze how different trigger images and the hyper-parameters in the wavelet transform would influence the performance of the proposed method. Extensive experiments on four benchmark remote sensing datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for both scene classification and semantic segmentation tasks and thus highlight the importance of designing advanced backdoor defense algorithms to address this threat in remote sensing scenarios. The code will be available online at \url{https://github.com/ndraeger/waba}.

The Outcome of the 2022 Landslide4Sense Competition: Advanced Landslide Detection from Multi-Source Satellite Imagery

The scientific outcomes of the 2022 Landslide4Sense (L4S) competition organized by the Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI) are presented here. The objective of the competition is to automatically detect landslides based on large-scale multiple sources of satellite imagery collected globally. The 2022 L4S aims to foster interdisciplinary research on recent developments in deep learning (DL) models for the semantic segmentation task using satellite imagery. In the past few years, DL-based models have achieved performance that meets expectations on image interpretation, due to the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The main objective of this article is to present the details and the best-performing algorithms featured in this competition. The winning solutions are elaborated with state-of-the-art models like the Swin Transformer, SegFormer, and U-Net. Advanced machine learning techniques and strategies such as hard example mining, self-training, and mix-up data augmentation are also considered. Moreover, we describe the L4S benchmark data set in order to facilitate further comparisons, and report the results of the accuracy assessment online. The data is accessible on \textit{Future Development Leaderboard} for future evaluation at \url{https://www.iarai.ac.at/landslide4sense/challenge/}, and researchers are invited to submit more prediction results, evaluate the accuracy of their methods, compare them with those of other users, and, ideally, improve the landslide detection results reported in this article.

Txt2Img-MHN: Remote Sensing Image Generation from Text Using Modern Hopfield Networks

The synthesis of high-resolution remote sensing images based on text descriptions has great potential in many practical application scenarios. Although deep neural networks have achieved great success in many important remote sensing tasks, generating realistic remote sensing images from text descriptions is still very difficult. To address this challenge, we propose a novel text-to-image modern Hopfield network (Txt2Img-MHN). The main idea of Txt2Img-MHN is to conduct hierarchical prototype learning on both text and image embeddings with modern Hopfield layers. Instead of directly learning concrete but highly diverse text-image joint feature representations for different semantics, Txt2Img-MHN aims to learn the most representative prototypes from text-image embeddings, achieving a coarse-to-fine learning strategy. These learned prototypes can then be utilized to represent more complex semantics in the text-to-image generation task. To better evaluate the realism and semantic consistency of the generated images, we further conduct zero-shot classification on real remote sensing data using the classification model trained on synthesized images. Despite its simplicity, we find that the overall accuracy in the zero-shot classification may serve as a good metric to evaluate the ability to generate an image from text. Extensive experiments on the benchmark remote sensing text-image dataset demonstrate that the proposed Txt2Img-MHN can generate more realistic remote sensing images than existing methods. Code and pre-trained models are available online (https://github.com/YonghaoXu/Txt2Img-MHN).

Landslide4Sense: Reference Benchmark Data and Deep Learning Models for Landslide Detection

This study introduces \textit{Landslide4Sense}, a reference benchmark for landslide detection from remote sensing. The repository features 3,799 image patches fusing optical layers from Sentinel-2 sensors with the digital elevation model and slope layer derived from ALOS PALSAR. The added topographical information facilitates an accurate detection of landslide borders, which recent researches have shown to be challenging using optical data alone. The extensive data set supports deep learning (DL) studies in landslide detection and the development and validation of methods for the systematic update of landslide inventories. The benchmark data set has been collected at four different times and geographical locations: Iburi (September 2018), Kodagu (August 2018), Gorkha (April 2015), and Taiwan (August 2009). Each image pixel is labelled as belonging to a landslide or not, incorporating various sources and thorough manual annotation. We then evaluate the landslide detection performance of 11 state-of-the-art DL segmentation models: U-Net, ResU-Net, PSPNet, ContextNet, DeepLab-v2, DeepLab-v3+, FCN-8s, LinkNet, FRRN-A, FRRN-B, and SQNet. All models were trained from scratch on patches from one quarter of each study area and tested on independent patches from the other three quarters. Our experiments demonstrate that ResU-Net outperformed the other models for the landslide detection task. We make the multi-source landslide benchmark data (Landslide4Sense) and the tested DL models publicly available at \url{www.landslide4sense.org}, establishing an important resource for remote sensing, computer vision, and machine learning communities in studies of image classification in general and applications to landslide detection in particular.