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Title: Auto-CM: Unsupervised Deep Learning for Satellite Imagery Composition and Cloud Masking Using Spatio-Temporal Dynamics
Cloud masking is both a fundamental and a critical task in the vast majority of Earth observation problems across social sectors, including agriculture, energy, water, etc. The sheer volume of satellite imagery to be processed has fast-climbed to a scale (e.g., >10 PBs/year) that is prohibitive for manual processing. Meanwhile, generating reliable cloud masks and image composite is increasingly challenging due to the continued distribution-shifts in the imagery collected by existing sensors and the ever-growing variety of sensors and platforms. Moreover, labeled samples are scarce and geographically limited compared to the needs in real large-scale applications. In related work, traditional remote sensing methods are often physics-based and rely on special spectral signatures from multi- or hyper-spectral bands, which are often not available in data collected by many -- and especially more recent -- high-resolution platforms. Machine learning and deep learning based methods, on the other hand, often require large volumes of up-to-date training data to be reliable and generalizable over space. We propose an autonomous image composition and masking (Auto-CM) framework to learn to solve the fundamental tasks in a label-free manner, by leveraging different dynamics of events in both geographic domains and time-series. Our experiments show that Auto-CM outperforms existing methods on a wide-range of data with different satellite platforms, geographic regions and bands.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2147195
PAR ID:
10506517
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
AAAI
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume:
37
Issue:
12
ISSN:
2159-5399
Page Range / eLocation ID:
14575 to 14583
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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