Data fusion is a well-known technique, becoming more and more popular in the Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation (AI4EO) domain mainly due to its ability of reinforcing AI4EO applications by combining multiple data sources and thus bringing better results. On the other hand, like other methods for satellite data analysis, data fusion itself is also benefiting and evolving thanks to the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this letter, four data fusion paradigms, based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are analyzed and implemented. The goals are to provide a systematic procedure for choosing the best data fusion framework, resulting in the best classification results, once the basic structure for the CNN has been defined, and to help interested researchers in their work when data fusion applied to remote sensing is involved. The procedure has been validated for land-cover classification but it can be transferred to other cases.

Constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) has been actively used for modeling and solving a wide range of complex real-world problems. However, it has been proven that developing efficient methods for solving CSP, especially for large problems, is very difficult and challenging. Existing complete methods for problem-solving are in most cases unsuitable. Therefore, proposing hybrid CSP-based methods for problem-solving has been of increasing interest in the last decades. This paper aims at proposing a novel approach that combines incomplete and complete CSP methods for problem-solving. The proposed approach takes advantage of the group search algorithm (GSO) and the constraint propagation (CP) methods to solve problems related to the remote sensing field. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first study that proposes a hybridization between an improved version of GSO and CP in the resolution of complex constraint-based problems. Experiments have been conducted for the resolution of object recognition problems in satellite images. Results show good performances in terms of convergence and running time of the proposed CSP-based method compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

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This summer, the whole world watched in horror as thousands of fires, again this year, ravaged the Amazon rainforest. Yet the forests are specific ecosystems: they are carbon sinks, meaning they stock carbon dioxide outside of the atmosphere; their destruction is contributing to climate change. To fight this phenomenon and protect the environment, governments, associations, scientists and local communities are relying more and more on technological advances. More specifically, here's how satellite imagery, artificial intelligence, and drones are being deployed in environmental battles. Combined with other sources of information (data collected in the field, aerial photography, etc.), satellite imagery makes it possible to analyse the evolution of forests, to detect changes that have arisen in a particular area and over a given period of time, and, ultimately, to determine the rate of global deforestation.

In this paper we show how using satellite images can improve the accuracy of housing price estimation models. Using Los Angeles County's property assessment dataset, by transferring learning from an Inception-v3 model pretrained on ImageNet, we could achieve an improvement of ~10% in R-squared score compared to two baseline models that only use non-image features of the house.

With the fire hose of imagery that's streaming daily from a variety of sensors, the need for using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate feature extraction is only increasing. The ability to train more than a dozen deep learning models on geospatial datasets and derive information products has been available using the ArcGIS API for Python or ArcGIS Pro, and users can scale up processing using ArcGIS Image Server. Esri is taking AI to the next level with ready-to-use geospatial AI models in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. Initially, three models have been made available. Two of the models use satellite imagery.

Preface: Though CosmiQ Works (and its associated blog: The DownLinQ) has unfortunately been shut down, there remains much to be done in the geospatial analytics domain. Accordingly, this blog details work performed independently of IQT and in my spare time. In a number of previous blogs [e.g. 1, 2, 3] and academic papers [e.g. 4, 5, 6] we've demonstrated the striking efficacy of adapting YOLO to detect objects in satellite imagery. Recall that YOLO is a leading deep learning object detection framework, designed to detect objects in imagery. YOLO maxes out at image sizes of a few thousand pixels in size, far too small to handle large scale satellite imagery which can exceed 100 million pixels.

It's well established that deepfake images of people are problematic, but it's now clearer that bogus satellite imagery could also represent a threat. The Verge reports that University of Washington-led researchers have developed a way to generate deepfake satellite photography as part of an effort to detect manipulated images. The team used an AI algorithm to generate deepfakes by feeding the traits of learned satellite images into different base maps. They could use Tacoma's roads and building locations, for example (at top right in the picture below), but superimpose Beijing's taller buildings (bottom right) or Seattle's low-rises (bottom left). You can apply greenery, too. While the execution isn't flawless, it's close enough that scientists believe you might blame any oddities on low image quality.

Reliable and frequent population estimation is key for making policies around vaccination and planning infrastructure delivery. Since censuses lack the spatio-temporal resolution required for these tasks, census-independent approaches, using remote sensing and microcensus data, have become popular. We estimate intercensal population count in two pilot districts in Mozambique. To encourage sustainability, we assess the feasibility of using publicly available datasets to estimate population. We also explore transfer learning with existing annotated datasets for predicting building footprints, and training with additional `dot' annotations from regions of interest to enhance these estimations. We observe that population predictions improve when using footprint area estimated with this approach versus only publicly available features.

Object detection is one of the fundamental objectives in Applied Computer Vision. In some of the applications, object detection becomes very challenging such as in the case of satellite image processing. Satellite image processing has remained the focus of researchers in domains of Precision Agriculture, Climate Change, Disaster Management, etc. Therefore, object detection in satellite imagery is one of the most researched problems in this domain. This paper focuses on aircraft detection. in satellite imagery using deep learning techniques. In this paper, we used YOLO deep learning framework for aircraft detection. This method uses satellite images collected by different sources as learning for the model to perform detection. Object detection in satellite images is mostly complex because objects have many variations, types, poses, sizes, complex and dense background. YOLO has some limitations for small size objects (less than$\sim$32 pixels per object), therefore we upsample the prediction grid to reduce the coarseness of the model and to accurately detect the densely clustered objects. The improved model shows good accuracy and performance on different unknown images having small, rotating, and dense objects to meet the requirements in real-time.