Airplane detection from satellite imagery is a challenging task due to the complex backgrounds in the images and differences in data acquisition conditions caused by the sensor geometry and atmospheric effects. Deep learning methods provide reliable and accurate solutions for automatic detection of airplanes; however, huge amount of training data is required to obtain promising results. In this study, we create a novel airplane detection dataset called High Resolution Planes (HRPlanes) by using images from Google Earth (GE) and labeling the bounding box of each plane on the images. HRPlanes include GE images of several different airports across the world to represent a variety of landscape, seasonal and satellite geometry conditions obtained from different satellites. We evaluated our dataset with two widely used object detection methods namely YOLOv4 and Faster R-CNN. Our preliminary results show that the proposed dataset can be a valuable data source and benchmark data set for future applications. Moreover, proposed architectures and results of this study could be used for transfer learning of different datasets and models for airplane detection.

SeeFar is an evolving collection of multi-resolution satellite images from public and commercial satellites. We specifically curated this dataset for training geospatial foundation models, unconstrained by satellite type. In recent years, advances in technology have made satellite imagery more accessible than ever. More earth-observing satellites have been launched in the last five years than in the previous fifty. Modern commercial satellites now offer up to 100 times the spatial resolution of public access satellites. However, the high cost and limited historical availability of commercial satellite imagery is a barrier to the training of foundational models, impacting what images can be used during inference. The SeeFar dataset represents a step towards training models that are satellite-agnostic by combining multi-resolution commercial and public access pre-processed images. This will enable users to utilize historical data alongside higher-resolution, more expensive satellite imagery, offering greater flexibility during inference. To achieve this, we describe a process for standardizing data from diverse satellite sources, normalizing different data formats, and aligning spectral bands to enhance interoperability. The SeeFar dataset includes images at a resolution of 384x384 pixels, spanning four spectral bands (Blue, Green, Red, and Near-Infrared) and expanding spatial resolutions (starting with 30, 10, 1.5, and 1.0 meters), all in cloud-optimized GeoTIFF format. It also provides consistent and comprehensive metadata to enhance data transparency and reliability. By aggregating data from multiple sources, SeeFar makes processed and consistent satellite data accessible to a wider range of users - from researchers to policymakers - fostering competition and innovation in satellite imagery analysis. The dataset is available at \url{coastalcarbon.ai/seefar}.

Land Use Land Cover (LULC) analysis on satellite images using deep learning-based methods is significantly helpful in understanding the geography, socio-economic conditions, poverty levels, and urban sprawl in developing countries. Recent works involve segmentation with LULC classes such as farmland, built-up areas, forests, meadows, water bodies, etc. Training deep learning methods on satellite images requires large sets of images annotated with LULC classes. However, annotated data for developing countries are scarce due to a lack of funding, absence of dedicated residential/industrial/economic zones, a large population, and diverse building materials. BD-SAT provides a high-resolution dataset that includes pixel-by-pixel LULC annotations for Dhaka metropolitan city and surrounding rural/urban areas. Using a strict and standardized procedure, the ground truth is created using Bing satellite imagery with a ground spatial distance of 2.22 meters per pixel. A three-stage, well-defined annotation process has been followed with support from GIS experts to ensure the reliability of the annotations. We performed several experiments to establish benchmark results. The results show that the annotated BD-SAT is sufficient to train large deep learning models with adequate accuracy for five major LULC classes: forest, farmland, built-up areas, water bodies, and meadows.

Multimodal fusion breaks through the barriers between diverse modalities and has already yielded numerous impressive performances. However, in various specialized fields, it is struggling to obtain sufficient alignment data for the training process, which seriously limits the use of previously elegant models. Thus, semi-supervised learning attempts to achieve multimodal alignment with fewer matched pairs but traditional methods like pseudo-labeling are difficult to apply in domains with no label information. To address these problems, we transform semi-supervised multimodal alignment into a manifold matching problem and propose a new method based on CLIP, named Gentle-CLIP. Specifically, we design a novel semantic density distribution loss to explore implicit semantic alignment information from unpaired multimodal data by constraining the latent representation distribution with fine granularity, thus eliminating the need for numerous strictly matched pairs. Meanwhile, we introduce multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy as well as self-supervised contrastive loss to pull separate modality distributions closer and enhance the stability of the representation distribution. In addition, the contrastive loss used in CLIP is employed on the supervised matched data to prevent negative optimization. Extensive experiments conducted on a range of tasks in various fields, including protein, remote sensing, and the general vision-language field, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Gentle-CLIP.

Terrestrial carbon fluxes provide vital information about our biosphere's health and its capacity to absorb anthropogenic CO$_2$ emissions. The importance of predicting carbon fluxes has led to the emerging field of data-driven carbon flux modelling (DDCFM), which uses statistical techniques to predict carbon fluxes from biophysical data. However, the field lacks a standardized dataset to promote comparisons between models. To address this gap, we present CarbonSense, the first machine learning-ready dataset for DDCFM. CarbonSense integrates measured carbon fluxes, meteorological predictors, and satellite imagery from 385 locations across the globe, offering comprehensive coverage and facilitating robust model training. Additionally, we provide a baseline model using a current state-of-the-art DDCFM approach and a novel transformer based model. Our experiments illustrate the potential gains that multimodal deep learning techniques can bring to this domain. By providing these resources, we aim to lower the barrier to entry for other deep learning researchers to develop new models and drive new advances in carbon flux modelling.

As low-quality housing and in particular certain roof characteristics are associated with an increased risk of malaria, classification of roof types based on remote sensing imagery can support the assessment of malaria risk and thereby help prevent the disease. To support research in this area, we release the Nacala-Roof-Material dataset, which contains high-resolution drone images from Mozambique with corresponding labels delineating houses and specifying their roof types. The dataset defines a multi-task computer vision problem, comprising object detection, classification, and segmentation. In addition, we benchmarked various state-of-the-art approaches on the dataset. Canonical U-Nets, YOLOv8, and a custom decoder on pretrained DINOv2 served as baselines. We show that each of the methods has its advantages but none is superior on all tasks, which highlights the potential of our dataset for future research in multi-task learning. While the tasks are closely related, accurate segmentation of objects does not necessarily imply accurate instance separation, and vice versa. We address this general issue by introducing a variant of the deep ordinal watershed (DOW) approach that additionally separates the interior of objects, allowing for improved object delineation and separation. We show that our DOW variant is a generic approach that improves the performance of both U-Net and DINOv2 backbones, leading to a better trade-off between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation.

Accurate estimates of Above Ground Biomass (AGB) are essential in addressing two of humanity's biggest challenges, climate change and biodiversity loss. Existing datasets for AGB estimation from satellite imagery are limited. Either they focus on specific, local regions at high resolution, or they offer global coverage at low resolution. There is a need for a machine learning-ready, globally representative, high-resolution benchmark. Our findings indicate significant variability in biomass estimates across different vegetation types, emphasizing the necessity for a dataset that accurately captures global diversity. To address these gaps, we introduce a comprehensive new dataset that is globally distributed, covers a range of vegetation types, and spans several years. This dataset combines AGB reference data from the GEDI mission with data from Sentinel-2 and PALSAR-2 imagery. Additionally, it includes pre-processed high-level features such as a dense canopy height map, an elevation map, and a land-cover classification map. We also produce a dense, high-resolution (10m) map of AGB predictions for the entire area covered by the dataset. Rigorously tested, our dataset is accompanied by several benchmark models and is publicly available. It can be easily accessed using a single line of code, offering a solid basis for efforts towards global AGB estimation. The GitHub repository github.com/ghjuliasialelli/AGBD serves as a one-stop shop for all code and data.

Satellite-based remote sensing has revolutionised the way we address global challenges in a rapidly evolving world. Huge quantities of Earth Observation (EO) data are generated by satellite sensors daily, but processing these large datasets for use in ML pipelines is technically and computationally challenging. Specifically, different types of EO data are often hosted on a variety of platforms, with differing availability for Python preprocessing tools. In addition, spatial alignment across data sources and data tiling can present significant technical hurdles for novice users. While some preprocessed EO datasets exist, their content is often limited to optical or near-optical wavelength data, which is ineffective at night or in adverse weather conditions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), an active sensing technique based on microwave length radiation, offers a viable alternative. However, the application of machine learning to SAR has been limited due to a lack of ML-ready data and pipelines, particularly for the full diversity of SAR data, including polarimetry, coherence and interferometry. We introduce M3LEO, a multi-modal, multi-label EO dataset that includes polarimetric, interferometric, and coherence SAR data derived from Sentinel-1, alongside Sentinel-2 RGB imagery and a suite of labelled tasks for model evaluation. M3LEO spans 17.5TB and contains approximately 10M data chips across six geographic regions. The dataset is complemented by a flexible PyTorch Lightning framework, with configuration management using Hydra. We provide tools to process any dataset available on popular platforms such as Google Earth Engine for integration with our framework. Initial experiments validate the utility of our data and framework, showing that SAR imagery contains information additional to that extractable from RGB data. Data at huggingface.co/M3LEO, and code at github.com/spaceml-org/M3LEO.

A continual learning (CL) model is desired for remote sensing image analysis because of varying camera parameters, spectral ranges, resolutions, etc. There exist some recent initiatives to develop CL techniques in this domain but they still depend on massive labelled samples which do not fully fit remote sensing applications because ground truths are often obtained via field-based surveys. This paper addresses this problem with a proposal of unsupervised flat-wide learning approach (UNISA) for unsupervised few-shot continual learning approaches of remote sensing image scene classifications which do not depend on any labelled samples for its model updates. UNISA is developed from the idea of prototype scattering and positive sampling for learning representations while the catastrophic forgetting problem is tackled with the flat-wide learning approach combined with a ball generator to address the data scarcity problem. Our numerical study with remote sensing image scene datasets and a hyperspectral dataset confirms the advantages of our solution. Source codes of UNISA are shared publicly in \url{https://github.com/anwarmaxsum/UNISA} to allow convenient future studies and reproductions of our numerical results.

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.