Recent work has shown that deep learning models can be used to classify land-use data from geospatial satellite imagery. We show that when these deep learning models are trained on data from specific continents/seasons, there is a high degree of variability in model performance on out-of-sample continents/seasons. This suggests that just because a model accurately predicts land-use classes in one continent or season does not mean that the model will accurately predict land-use classes in a different continent or season. We then use clustering techniques on satellite imagery from different continents to visualize the differences in landscapes that make geospatial generalization particularly difficult, and summarize our takeaways for future satellite imagery-related applications.

Want to be a part of an elite team where our innovative technical solutions are delivered to customers that advance the state of the art while addressing long-term problems of importance to national security? At our Leidos' Multi-Spectrum Warfare Research and Analytics Systems (MSWRAS) Division, an organization in the Leidos Innovation Center (LInC), we are looking for you, our next Scientist who specializes in remote sensing data analytics. Join our team of Ph.D. level peers in designing and developing advanced technology-based solutions for contract research and development projects working in our Arlington, VA office. Fun roles you will have in this job: Describe instances of successful, proven, and demonstrable experience contributing to the technical work as part of cross-discipline teams in the development and integration of software-based solutions for competitive, contract-based applied research programs Work with teams composed of members from industry, small businesses, and academic-based researchers and should have experience working on projects focused on multiple technical fields such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, engineering, and software development and integration Describe how the work products to which they contributed had solved customers' problems in such domains as energy, health, and national security or in the commercial sector Work within the MSWRAS Division and across the LInC, performing basic and applied contract research and development projects both leading and working under the guidance of senior scientists and engineers. Processing, interpreting and analyzing large volumes of data collected by remote sensing platforms but may also include other types of phenomenological data such as field measurements, or weather data Independently design and undertake new research as well as partner in a team environment across organizations Contribute to the development of creative and innovative R&D approaches to solving major remote sensing analytics challenges and work with potential sponsors (customers or internal champions) to secure funding for new research efforts based on those topics Contribute to the productivity of teams composed of fellow researchers, data scientists, data engineers, and software engineers to execute complex R&D programs Under the guidance of a senior scientist or engineer, design and develop or integrate secure and scalable applications that are part of broader solutions, that are applicable across multiple domains.

Deep learning in remote sensing has become an international hype, but it is mostly limited to the evaluation of optical data. Although deep learning has been introduced in SAR data processing, despite successful first attempts, its huge potential remains locked. For example, to the best knowledge of the authors, there is no single example of deep learning in SAR that has been developed up to operational processing of big data or integrated into the production chain of any satellite mission. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the most relevant deep learning models and concepts, point out possible pitfalls by analyzing special characteristics of SAR data, review the state-of-the-art of deep learning applied to SAR in depth, summarize available benchmarks, and recommend some important future research directions. With this effort, we hope to stimulate more research in this interesting yet under-exploited research field.

The number of Earth observation satellites carrying optical sensors with similar characteristics is constantly growing. Despite their similarities and the potential synergies among them, derived satellite products are often developed for each sensor independently. Differences in retrieved radiances lead to significant drops in accuracy, which hampers knowledge and information sharing across sensors. This is particularly harmful for machine learning algorithms, since gathering new ground truth data to train models for each sensor is costly and requires experienced manpower. In this work, we propose a domain adaptation transformation to reduce the statistical differences between images of two satellite sensors in order to boost the performance of transfer learning models. The proposed methodology is based on the Cycle Consistent Generative Adversarial Domain Adaptation (CyCADA) framework that trains the transformation model in an unpaired manner. In particular, Landsat-8 and Proba-V satellites, which present different but compatible spatio-spectral characteristics, are used to illustrate the method. The obtained transformation significantly reduces differences between the image datasets while preserving the spatial and spectral information of adapted images, which is hence useful for any general purpose cross-sensor application. In addition, the training of the proposed adversarial domain adaptation model can be modified to improve the performance in a specific remote sensing application, such as cloud detection, by including a dedicated term in the cost function. Results show that, when the proposed transformation is applied, cloud detection models trained in Landsat-8 data increase cloud detection accuracy in Proba-V.

Climate change is the biggest problem that the life on this planet is facing today. It will need every possible situation including technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Here are 5 ways machine learning can help combat global climate change. Carbon Tracker is an independent financial think-tank working toward the UN goal of preventing new coal plants from being built by 2020. By monitoring coal plant emissions with satellite imagery, Carbon Tracker can use the information it gathers to convince the finance industry that carbon plants aren't profitable.

Semantic segmentation models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained much attention in relation to remote sensing and have achieved remarkable performance for the extraction of buildings from high-resolution aerial images. However, the issue of limited generalization for unseen images remains. When there is a domain gap between the training and test datasets, CNN-based segmentation models trained by a training dataset fail to segment buildings for the test dataset. In this paper, we propose segmentation networks based on a domain adaptive transfer attack (DATA) scheme for building extraction from aerial images. The proposed system combines the domain transfer and adversarial attack concepts. Based on the DATA scheme, the distribution of the input images can be shifted to that of the target images while turning images into adversarial examples against a target network. Defending adversarial examples adapted to the target domain can overcome the performance degradation due to the domain gap and increase the robustness of the segmentation model. Cross-dataset experiments and the ablation study are conducted for the three different datasets: the Inria aerial image labeling dataset, the Massachusetts building dataset, and the WHU East Asia dataset. Compared to the performance of the segmentation network without the DATA scheme, the proposed method shows improvements in the overall IoU. Moreover, it is verified that the proposed method outperforms even when compared to feature adaptation (FA) and output space adaptation (OSA).

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Recently, methods based on Faster region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) have been popular in multi-class object detection in remote sensing images due to their outstanding detection performance. The methods generally propose candidate region of interests (ROIs) through a region propose network (RPN), and the regions with high enough intersection-over-union (IoU) values against ground truth are treated as positive samples for training. In this paper, we find that the detection result of such methods is sensitive to the adaption of different IoU thresholds. Specially, detection performance of small objects is poor when choosing a normal higher threshold, while a lower threshold will result in poor location accuracy caused by a large quantity of false positives.

This course is designed to equip you with the theoretical and practical knowledge of Machine Learning as applied for geospatial analysis, namely Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing. By the end of the course, you will feel confident and completely understand the Machine Learning applications in GIS technology and how to use Machine Learning algorithms for various geospatial tasks, such as land use and land cover mapping (classifications) and object-based image analysis (segmentation). This course will also prepare you for using GIS with open source and free software tools. In the course, you will be able to apply such Machine Learning algorithms as Random Forest, Support Vector Machines and Decision Trees (and others) for classification of satellite imagery. On top of that, you will practice GIS by completing an entire GIS project by exploring the power of Machine Learning, cloud computing and Big Data analysis using Google Erath Engine for any geographic area in the world.

Scene classification is an important aspect of image/video understanding and segmentation. However, remote-sensing scene classification is a challenging image recognition task, partly due to the limited training data, which causes deep-learning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to overfit. Another difficulty is that images often have very different scales and orientation (viewing angle). Yet another is that the resulting networks may be very large, again making them prone to overfitting and unsuitable for deployment on memory- and energy-limited devices. We propose an efficient deep-learning approach to tackle these problems. We use transfer learning to compensate for the lack of data, and data augmentation to tackle varying scale and orientation.

Recently, CNN object detectors have achieved high accuracy on remote sensing images but require huge labor and time costs on annotation. In this paper, we propose a new uncertainty-based active learning which can select images with more information for annotation and detector can still reach high performance with a fraction of the training images. Our method not only analyzes objects' classification uncertainty to find least confident objects but also considers their regression uncertainty to declare outliers. Besides, we bring out two extra weights to overcome two difficulties in remote sensing datasets, class-imbalance and difference in images' objects amount. We experiment our active learning algorithm on DOTA dataset with CenterNet as object detector. We achieve same-level performance as full supervision with only half images. We even override full supervision with 55% images and augmented weights on least confident images.