No Arabic abstract
While annotated images for change detection using satellite imagery are scarce and costly to obtain, there is a wealth of unlabeled images being generated every day. In order to leverage these data to learn an image representation more adequate for change detection, we explore methods that exploit the temporal consistency of Sentinel-2 times series to obtain a usable self-supervised learning signal. For this, we build and make publicly available (https://zenodo.org/record/4280482) the Sentinel-2 Multitemporal Cities Pairs (S2MTCP) dataset, containing multitemporal image pairs from 1520 urban areas worldwide. We test the results of multiple self-supervised learning methods for pre-training models for change detection and apply it on a public change detection dataset made of Sentinel-2 image pairs (OSCD).
Most change detection methods assume that pre-change and post-change images are acquired by the same sensor. However, in many real-life scenarios, e.g., natural disaster, it is more practical to use the latest available images before and after the occurrence of incidence, which may be acquired using different sensors. In particular, we are interested in the combination of the images acquired by optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors. SAR images appear vastly different from the optical images even when capturing the same scene. Adding to this, change detection methods are often constrained to use only target image-pair, no labeled data, and no additional unlabeled data. Such constraints limit the scope of traditional supervised machine learning and unsupervised generative approaches for multi-sensor change detection. Recent rapid development of self-supervised learning methods has shown that some of them can even work with only few images. Motivated by this, in this work we propose a method for multi-sensor change detection using only the unlabeled target bi-temporal images that are used for training a network in self-supervised fashion by using deep clustering and contrastive learning. The proposed method is evaluated on four multi-modal bi-temporal scenes showing change and the benefits of our self-supervised approach are demonstrated.
For high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing images, bitemporal supervised learning always dominates change detection using many pairwise labeled bitemporal images. However, it is very expensive and time-consuming to pairwise label large-scale bitemporal HSR remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose single-temporal supervised learning (STAR) for change detection from a new perspective of exploiting object changes in unpaired images as supervisory signals. STAR enables us to train a high-accuracy change detector only using textbf{unpaired} labeled images and generalize to real-world bitemporal images. To evaluate the effectiveness of STAR, we design a simple yet effective change detector called ChangeStar, which can reuse any deep semantic segmentation architecture by the ChangeMixin module. The comprehensive experimental results show that ChangeStar outperforms the baseline with a large margin under single-temporal supervision and achieves superior performance under bitemporal supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/Z-Zheng/ChangeStar
Multi-spectral satellite imagery provides valuable data at global scale for many environmental and socio-economic applications. Building supervised machine learning models based on these imagery, however, may require ground reference labels which are not available at global scale. Here, we propose a generative model to produce multi-resolution multi-spectral imagery based on Sentinel-2 data. The resulting synthetic images are indistinguishable from real ones by humans. This technique paves the road for future work to generate labeled synthetic imagery that can be used for data augmentation in data scarce regions and applications.
The increasing level of marine plastic pollution poses severe threats to the marine ecosystem and biodiversity. The present study attempted to explore the full functionality of open Sentinel satellite data and ML models for detecting and classifying floating plastic debris in Mytilene (Greece), Limassol (Cyprus), Calabria (Italy), and Beirut (Lebanon). Two ML models, i.e. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) were utilized to carry out the classification analysis. In-situ plastic location data was collected from the control experiment conducted in Mytilene, Greece and Limassol, Cyprus, and the same was considered for training the models. Both remote sensing bands and spectral indices were used for developing the ML models. A spectral signature profile for plastic was created for discriminating the floating plastic from other marine debris. A newly developed index, kernel Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (kNDVI), was incorporated into the modelling to examine its contribution to model performances. Both SVM and RF were performed well in five models and test case combinations. Among the two ML models, the highest performance was measured for the RF. The inclusion of kNDVI was found effective and increased the model performances, reflected by high balanced accuracy measured for model 2 (~80% to ~98 % for SVM and ~87% to ~97 % for RF). Using the best-performed model, an automated floating plastic detection system was developed and tested in Calabria and Beirut. For both sites, the trained model had detected the floating plastic with ~99% accuracy. Among the six predictors, the FDI was found the most important variable for detecting marine floating plastic. These findings collectively suggest that high-resolution remote sensing imagery and the automated ML models can be an effective alternative for the cost-effective detection of marine floating plastic.
Climate change has caused reductions in river runoffs and aquifer recharge resulting in an increasingly unsustainable crop water demand from reduced freshwater availability. Achieving food security while deploying water in a sustainable manner will continue to be a major challenge necessitating careful monitoring and tracking of agricultural water usage. Historically, monitoring water usage has been a slow and expensive manual process with many imperfections and abuses. Ma-chine learning and remote sensing developments have increased the ability to automatically monitor irrigation patterns, but existing techniques often require curated and labelled irrigation data, which are expensive and time consuming to obtain and may not exist for impactful areas such as developing countries. In this paper, we explore an end-to-end real world application of irrigation detection with uncurated and unlabeled satellite imagery. We apply state-of-the-art self-supervised deep learning techniques to optical remote sensing data, and find that we are able to detect irrigation with up to nine times better precision, 90% better recall and 40% more generalization ability than the traditional supervised learning methods.