In remote sensing, we are interested in modeling various modalities for some geographic location. Several works have focused on learning the relationship between a location and type of landscape, habitability, audio, textual descriptions, etc. Recently, a common way to approach these problems is to train a deep-learning model that uses satellite images to infer some unique characteristics of the location. In this work, we present a deep-learning model, GeoBind, that can infer about multiple modalities, specifically text, image, and audio, from satellite imagery of a location. To do this, we use satellite images as the binding element and contrastively align all other modalities to the satellite image data. Our training results in a joint embedding space with multiple types of data: satellite image, ground-level image, audio, and text. Furthermore, our approach does not require a single complex dataset that contains all the modalities mentioned above. Rather it only requires multiple satellite-image paired data. While we only align three modalities in this paper, we present a general framework that can be used to create an embedding space with any number of modalities by using satellite images as the binding element. Our results show that, unlike traditional unimodal models, GeoBind is versatile and can reason about multiple modalities for a given satellite image input.

The volume of remote sensing data is experiencing rapid growth, primarily due to the plethora of space and air platforms equipped with an array of sensors. Due to limited hardware and battery constraints the data is transmitted back to Earth for processing. The large amounts of data along with security concerns call for new compression and encryption techniques capable of preserving reconstruction quality while minimizing the transmission cost of this data back to Earth. This study investigates image compression based on convolutional variational autoencoders (CVAE), which are capable of substantially reducing the volume of transmitted data while guaranteeing secure lossy image reconstruction. CVAEs have been demonstrated to outperform conventional compression methods such as JPEG2000 by a substantial margin on compression benchmark datasets. The proposed model draws on the strength of the CVAE's capability to abstract data into highly insightful latent spaces, and combining it with the utilization of an entropy bottleneck is capable of finding an optimal balance between compressibility and reconstruction quality. The balance is reached by optimizing over a composite loss function that represents the rate-distortion curve.

Few-shot segmentation is a task to segment objects or regions of novel classes within an image given only a few annotated examples. In the generalized setting, the task extends to segment both the base and the novel classes. The main challenge is how to train the model such that the addition of novel classes does not hurt the base classes performance, also known as catastrophic forgetting. To mitigate this issue, we use SegGPT as our base model and train it on the base classes. Then, we use separate learnable prompts to handle predictions for each novel class. To handle various object sizes which typically present in remote sensing domain, we perform patch-based prediction. To address the discontinuities along patch boundaries, we propose a patch-and-stitch technique by re-framing the problem as an image inpainting task. During inference, we also utilize image similarity search over image embeddings for prompt selection and novel class filtering to reduce false positive predictions. Based on our experiments, our proposed method boosts the weighted mIoU of a simple fine-tuned SegGPT from 15.96 to 35.08 on the validation set of few-shot OpenEarthMap dataset given in the challenge.

Remote sensing semantic segmentation (RSS) is an essential task in Earth Observation missions. Due to data privacy concerns, high-quality remote sensing images with annotations cannot be well shared among institutions, making it difficult to fully utilize RSS data to train a generalized model. Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-preserving collaborative learning technology, is a potential solution. However, the current research on how to effectively apply FL in RSS is still scarce and requires further investigation. Remote sensing images in various institutions often exhibit strong geographical heterogeneity. More specifically, it is reflected in terms of class-distribution heterogeneity and object-appearance heterogeneity. Unfortunately, most existing FL studies show inadequate focus on geographical heterogeneity, thus leading to performance degradation in the global model. Considering the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel Geographic Heterogeneity-Aware Federated Learning (GeoFed) framework to address privacy-preserving RSS. Through Global Feature Extension and Tail Regeneration modules, class-distribution heterogeneity is alleviated. Additionally, we design an Essential Feature Mining strategy to alleviate object-appearance heterogeneity by constructing essential features. Extensive experiments on three datasets (i.e., FBP, CASID, Inria) show that our GeoFed consistently outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available publicly.

Land cover classification and change detection are two important applications of remote sensing and Earth observation (EO) that have benefited greatly from the advances in deep learning. Convolutional and transformer-based U-net models are the state-of-the-art architectures for these tasks, and their performances have been boosted by an increased availability of large-scale annotated EO datasets. However, the influence of different visual characteristics of the input EO data on a model's predictions is not well understood. In this work we systematically examine model sensitivities with respect to several color-and texture-based distortions on the input EO data during inference, given models that have been trained without such distortions. We conduct experiments with multiple state-of-the-art segmentation networks for land cover classification and show that they are in general more sensitive to texture than to color distortions. Beyond revealing intriguing characteristics of widely used land cover classification models, our results can also be used to guide the development of more robust models within the EO domain. Land cover classification is a key application for remote sensing and Earth observation (EO) data, as it provides essential information for various domains, such as urban planning, environmental monitoring, disaster management, and agriculture.

Remote sensing change detection (CD) is a pivotal technique that pinpoints changes on a global scale based on multi-temporal images. With the recent expansion of deep learning, supervised deep learning-based CD models have shown satisfactory performance. However, CD sample labeling is very time-consuming as it is densely labeled and requires expert knowledge. To alleviate this problem, we introduce ChangeAnywhere, a novel CD sample generation method using the semantic latent diffusion model and single-temporal images. Specifically, ChangeAnywhere leverages the relative ease of acquiring large single-temporal semantic datasets to generate large-scale, diverse, and semantically annotated bi-temporal CD datasets. ChangeAnywhere captures the two essentials of CD samples, i.e., change implies semantically different, and non-change implies reasonable change under the same semantic constraints. We generated ChangeAnywhere-100K, the largest synthesis CD dataset with 100,000 pairs of CD samples based on the proposed method. The ChangeAnywhere-100K significantly improved both zero-shot and few-shot performance on two CD benchmark datasets for various deep learning-based CD models, as demonstrated by transfer experiments. This paper delineates the enormous potential of ChangeAnywhere for CD sample generation and demonstrates the subsequent enhancement of model performance. Therefore, ChangeAnywhere offers a potent tool for remote sensing CD. All codes and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/tangkai-RS/ChangeAnywhere.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been successfully applied to earth observation (EO) data and opened new research avenues. Despite the theoretical and practical advances of these techniques, DNNs are still considered black box tools and by default are designed to give point predictions. However, the majority of EO applications demand reliable uncertainty estimates that can support practitioners in critical decision making tasks. This work provides a theoretical and quantitative comparison of existing uncertainty quantification methods for DNNs applied to the task of wind speed estimation in satellite imagery of tropical cyclones. We provide a detailed evaluation of predictive uncertainty estimates from state-of-the-art uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for DNNs. We find that predictive uncertainties can be utilized to further improve accuracy and analyze the predictive uncertainties of different methods across storm categories.

Earth observation (EO) satellite missions have been providing detailed images about the state of the Earth and its land cover for over 50 years. Long term missions, such as NASA's Landsat, Terra, and Aqua satellites, and more recently, the ESA's Sentinel missions, record images of the entire world every few days. Although single images provide point-in-time data, repeated images of the same area, or satellite image time series (SITS) provide information about the changing state of vegetation and land use. These SITS are useful for modeling dynamic processes and seasonal changes such as plant phenology. They have potential benefits for many aspects of land and natural resource management, including applications in agricultural, forest, water, and disaster management, urban planning, and mining. However, the resulting satellite image time series (SITS) are complex, incorporating information from the temporal, spatial, and spectral dimensions. Therefore, deep learning methods are often deployed as they can analyze these complex relationships. This review presents a summary of the state-of-the-art methods of modelling environmental, agricultural, and other Earth observation variables from SITS data using deep learning methods. We aim to provide a resource for remote sensing experts interested in using deep learning techniques to enhance Earth observation models with temporal information.

Novel deep-learning (DL) architectures have reached a level where they can generate digital media, including photorealistic images, that are difficult to distinguish from real data. These technologies have already been used to generate training data for Machine Learning (ML) models, and large text-to-image models like DALL E 2, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion are achieving remarkable results in realistic high-resolution image generation. Given these developments, issues of data authentication in monitoring and verification deserve a careful and systematic analysis: How realistic are synthetic images? How easily can they be generated? How useful are they for ML researchers, and what is their potential for Open Science? In this work, we use novel DL models to explore how synthetic satellite images can be created using conditioning mechanisms. We investigate the challenges of synthetic satellite image generation and evaluate the results based on authenticity and state-of-the-art metrics. Furthermore, we investigate how synthetic data can alleviate the lack of data in the context of ML methods for remote-sensing. Finally we discuss implications of synthetic satellite imagery in the context of monitoring and verification.

Satellite imagery is crucial for tasks like environmental monitoring and urban planning. Typically, it relies on semantic segmentation or Land Use Land Cover (LULC) classification to categorize each pixel. Despite the advancements brought about by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), their performance in segmentation tasks is hindered by challenges such as limited availability of labeled data, class imbalance and the inherent variability and complexity of satellite images. In order to mitigate those issues, our study explores the effectiveness of a Cut-and-Paste augmentation technique for semantic segmentation in satellite images. We adapt this augmentation, which usually requires labeled instances, to the case of semantic segmentation. By leveraging the connected components in the semantic segmentation labels, we extract instances that are then randomly pasted during training. Using the DynamicEarthNet dataset and a U-Net model for evaluation, we found that this augmentation significantly enhances the mIoU score on the test set from 37.9 to 44.1. This finding highlights the potential of the Cut-and-Paste augmentation to improve the generalization capabilities of semantic segmentation models in satellite imagery.