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.

In the big data era, integrating diverse data modalities poses significant challenges, particularly in complex fields like healthcare. This paper introduces a new process model for multimodal Data Fusion for Data Mining, integrating embeddings and the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining with the existing Data Fusion Information Group model. Our model aims to decrease computational costs, complexity, and bias while improving efficiency and reliability. We also propose "disentangled dense fusion", a novel embedding fusion method designed to optimize mutual information and facilitate dense inter-modality feature interaction, thereby minimizing redundant information. We demonstrate the model's efficacy through three use cases: predicting diabetic retinopathy using retinal images and patient metadata, domestic violence prediction employing satellite imagery, internet, and census data, and identifying clinical and demographic features from radiography images and clinical notes. The model achieved a Macro F1 score of 0.92 in diabetic retinopathy prediction, an R-squared of 0.854 and sMAPE of 24.868 in domestic violence prediction, and a macro AUC of 0.92 and 0.99 for disease prediction and sex classification, respectively, in radiological analysis. These results underscore the Data Fusion for Data Mining model's potential to significantly impact multimodal data processing, promoting its adoption in diverse, resource-constrained settings.

The growing interest in satellite imagery has triggered the need for efficient mechanisms to extract valuable information from these vast data sources, providing deeper insights. Even though deep learning has shown significant progress in satellite image classification. Nevertheless, in the literature, only a few results can be found on weight initialization techniques. These techniques traditionally involve initializing the networks' weights before training on extensive datasets, distinct from fine-tuning the weights of pre-trained networks. In this study, a novel weight initialization method is proposed in the context of satellite image classification. The proposed weight initialization method is mathematically detailed during the forward and backward passes of the convolutional neural network (CNN) model. Extensive experiments are carried out using six real-world datasets. Comparative analyses with existing weight initialization techniques made on various well-known CNN models reveal that the proposed weight initialization technique outperforms the previous competitive techniques in classification accuracy. The complete code of the proposed technique, along with the obtained results, is available at https://github.com/WadiiBoulila/Weight-Initialization

In this research, we propose the first approach for integrating the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) with various pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models for remote sensing (RS) scene classification tasks using the EuroSAT dataset. Our novel methodology, named KCN, aims to replace traditional Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) with KAN to enhance classification performance. We employed multiple CNN-based models, including VGG16, MobileNetV2, EfficientNet, ConvNeXt, ResNet101, and Vision Transformer (ViT), and evaluated their performance when paired with KAN. Our experiments demonstrated that KAN achieved high accuracy with fewer training epochs and parameters. Specifically, ConvNeXt paired with KAN showed the best performance, achieving 94% accuracy in the first epoch, which increased to 96% and remained consistent across subsequent epochs. The results indicated that KAN and MLP both achieved similar accuracy, with KAN performing slightly better in later epochs. By utilizing the EuroSAT dataset, we provided a robust testbed to investigate whether KAN is suitable for remote sensing classification tasks. Given that KAN is a novel algorithm, there is substantial capacity for further development and optimization, suggesting that KCN offers a promising alternative for efficient image analysis in the RS field.

Urban heat islands, defined as specific zones exhibiting substantially higher temperatures than their immediate environs, pose significant threats to environmental sustainability and public health. This study introduces a novel machine-learning model that amalgamates data from the Sentinel-3 satellite, meteorological predictions, and additional remote sensing inputs. The primary aim is to generate detailed spatiotemporal maps that forecast the peak temperatures within a 24-hour period in Turin. Experimental results validate the model's proficiency in predicting temperature patterns, achieving a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 2.09 degrees Celsius for the year 2023 at a resolution of 20 meters per pixel, thereby enriching our knowledge of urban climatic behavior. This investigation enhances the understanding of urban microclimates, emphasizing the importance of cross-disciplinary data integration, and laying the groundwork for informed policy-making aimed at alleviating the negative impacts of extreme urban temperatures.

Accurate geo-localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is crucial for a variety of outdoor applications including search and rescue operations, power line inspections, and environmental monitoring. The vulnerability of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals to interference and spoofing necessitates the development of additional robust localization methods for autonomous navigation. Visual Geo-localization (VG), leveraging onboard cameras and reference satellite maps, offers a promising solution for absolute localization. Specifically, Thermal Geo-localization (TG), which relies on image-based matching between thermal imagery with satellite databases, stands out by utilizing infrared cameras for effective night-time localization. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of current TG approaches, are hindered by dense sampling on satellite maps and geometric noises in thermal query images. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we introduce STHN, a novel UAV thermal geo-localization approach that employs a coarse-to-fine deep homography estimation method. This method attains reliable thermal geo-localization within a 512-meter radius of the UAV's last known location even with a challenging 11% overlap between satellite and thermal images, despite the presence of indistinct textures in thermal imagery and self-similar patterns in both spectra. Our research significantly enhances UAV thermal geo-localization performance and robustness against the impacts of geometric noises under low-visibility conditions in the wild. The code will be made publicly available.

Urban region profiling aims to learn a low-dimensional representation of a given urban area while preserving its characteristics, such as demographics, infrastructure, and economic activities, for urban planning and development. However, prevalent pretrained models, particularly those reliant on satellite imagery, face dual challenges. Firstly, concentrating solely on macro-level patterns from satellite data may introduce bias, lacking nuanced details at micro levels, such as architectural details at a place.Secondly, the lack of interpretability in pretrained models limits their utility in providing transparent evidence for urban planning. In response to these issues, we devise a novel framework entitled UrbanVLP based on Vision-Language Pretraining. Our UrbanVLP seamlessly integrates multi-granularity information from both macro (satellite) and micro (street-view) levels, overcoming the limitations of prior pretrained models. Moreover, it introduces automatic text generation and calibration, elevating interpretability in downstream applications by producing high-quality text descriptions of urban imagery. Rigorous experiments conducted across six urban indicator prediction tasks underscore its superior performance.

Plant health can be monitored dynamically using multispectral sensors that measure Near-Infrared reflectance (NIR). Despite this potential, obtaining and annotating high-resolution NIR images poses a significant challenge for training deep neural networks. Typically, large networks pre-trained on the RGB domain are utilized to fine-tune infrared images. This practice introduces a domain shift issue because of the differing visual traits between RGB and NIR images.As an alternative to fine-tuning, a method called low-rank adaptation (LoRA) enables more efficient training by optimizing rank-decomposition matrices while keeping the original network weights frozen. However, existing parameter-efficient adaptation strategies for remote sensing images focus on RGB images and overlook domain shift issues in the NIR domain. Therefore, this study investigates the potential benefits of using vision transformer (ViT) backbones pre-trained in the RGB domain, with low-rank adaptation for downstream tasks in the NIR domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that employing LoRA with pre-trained ViT backbones yields the best performance for downstream tasks applied to NIR images.

With the rise of Visual and Language Pretraining (VLP), an increasing number of downstream tasks are adopting the paradigm of pretraining followed by fine-tuning. Although this paradigm has demonstrated potential in various multimodal downstream tasks, its implementation in the remote sensing domain encounters some obstacles. Specifically, the tendency for same-modality embeddings to cluster together impedes efficient transfer learning. To tackle this issue, we review the aim of multimodal transfer learning for downstream tasks from a unified perspective, and rethink the optimization process based on three distinct objectives. We propose "Harmonized Transfer Learning and Modality Alignment (HarMA)", a method that simultaneously satisfies task constraints, modality alignment, and single-modality uniform alignment, while minimizing training overhead through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Remarkably, without the need for external data for training, HarMA achieves state-of-the-art performance in two popular multimodal retrieval tasks in the field of remote sensing. Our experiments reveal that HarMA achieves competitive and even superior performance to fully fine-tuned models with only minimal adjustable parameters. Due to its simplicity, HarMA can be integrated into almost all existing multimodal pretraining models. We hope this method can facilitate the efficient application of large models to a wide range of downstream tasks while significantly reducing the resource consumption. Code is available at https://github.com/seekerhuang/HarMA.

With the rapid development of earth observation technology, we have entered an era of massively available satellite remote-sensing data. However, a large amount of satellite remote sensing data lacks a label or the label cost is too high to hinder the potential of AI technology mining satellite data. Especially in such an emergency response scenario that uses satellite data to evaluate the degree of disaster damage. Disaster damage assessment encountered bottlenecks due to excessive focus on the damage of a certain building in a specific geographical space or a certain area on a larger scale. In fact, in the early days of disaster emergency response, government departments were more concerned about the overall damage rate of the disaster area instead of single-building damage, because this helps the government decide the level of emergency response. We present an innovative algorithm that constructs Neyman stratified random sampling trees for binary classification and extends this approach to multiclass problems. Through extensive experimentation on various datasets and model structures, our findings demonstrate that our method surpasses both passive and conventional active learning techniques in terms of class rate estimation and model enhancement with only 30\%-60\% of the annotation cost of simple sampling. It effectively addresses the 'sampling bias' challenge in traditional active learning strategies and mitigates the 'cold start' dilemma. The efficacy of our approach is further substantiated through application to disaster evaluation tasks using Xview2 Satellite imagery, showcasing its practical utility in real-world contexts.