Neural nets in Remote Sensing

Neural nets, a summary: (The chain rule * your GPU RAM)

Around 2 years ago I remember having a discussion with Jan Boehm about photogrammetry after my first meeting as the shadow wavelength rep on the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry committee. He mentioned Agisoft, which I was already using and familiar with at the time, but then mentioned the movement in dense matching algorithms towards use of neural nets, mentioning one which had been submitted to the KITTI stereo benchmark.

Disparity map using Žbontar’s methods

This piqued my curiosity, and I remember reading and being quite excited by Jure’s paper. While some concepts were new to me, the use of Convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) and the two types of architecture used to initialize the initial results, before moving towards post-processing using semi-global matching. I remember sinking a great deal of time into reading about the methods, exploring the github and methods used within the core of the paper, and subsequently hounding a colleague who was using a Titan-X for some deep learning work for some time with it.

I remember I took the ideas with me to EGU 2016, and even went to the point of acquiring a data set I thought would be worthy of testing it with from a German photogrammetrist, Andreas Kaiser. Alas, it wasn’t to be due to the hardware limitations and the fact that I wasn’t very familiar with the lua programming language. However I had learned a lot about the nature of deep learning, which I felt was a decent investment of my time.

The reason for this blog entry, however, isn’t to enlighten the reader of my failure to get up to speed with neural nets at the time, it’s much more hopeful than that! Fast forward two years, and development within the field of deep learning has come on leaps and bounds. With serious development time going into TensorFlow, and a beautiful and accessible front end in the form of keras, the python user really does have the tools to apply neural nets to all sorts of applications within image-based studies.

Having learned the basic ideas around neural nets from my initial excitement a long time ago I decided to try and get involved with the community once more. A few months back, a well timed kaggle competition came up which involved image classification, which raised an eyebrow. I contacted an old friend of mine who had just finished his PhD in medical imaging and we set to take up the challenge.

The task for the competition involved labeling satellite imagery

Since starting the task, I feel like I’ve come on leaps and bounds with not only the concepts behind ConvNets, but their architecture and application in the python framework. Whilst we generated lots of code (will be on github in due course), and had lots of ideas floating about, we finished a decidedly average mid-table – this first pass was as much an experience in learning about organisation as well as about imaging science, but it’s made me rethink about using ConvNets in a Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry environment.

Whilst we are seeing more contributions coming out of the community, and the popularity of other less technical concepts like support vector machines have shown I’m hoping to extend my skill set to include all of these in the future. If anyone who happens to be reading this feel the same, don’t hesitate to get in touch!