Deep learning pipeline for orbital satellite data for detecting clouds | Hacker News Reader

Deep learning pipeline for orbital satellite data for detecting clouds

github.com

60 pointskartikkumar17 comments

This is neat. We've deployed a 98+% accuracy satellite & aerial cloud detection solution for many years, so I would have the following suggestions:

-Why use AlexNet and not VGG (or Googlenet)?

-Make sure to train on clouds vs desert. There are a lot of instances where their spectral signatures are very close, depending on the satellite.

-Make sure to train on clouds vs snow. They are even more close.

-Dark clouds. This might not show up much unless you're working with the satellite vendor, but there are cloud formations where shadows of clouds project onto other clouds. Very difficult to deal with and NN may be well suited to it.

I would say since it's absolutely possible to get higher accuracy using older methods on this exact satellite constellation, there is definitely room for improvement. Just switching to VGG might even do the trick. But this is a great first step!

I'd add salines. My mother allways says that she and her team was very confused about a static "cloud" over Bolivia until they realize it was a saline. It was a long time ago, using the firsts satellite images, so they had less resolution and probably only the visible spectrum.

Example: https://www.google.com/maps/@-19.8339409,-67.5366835,253390m...

[Cloudless developer here]

Thanks for all the great suggestions! In terms of your existing 98% accuracy solution, can you point me to more details if possible?

I grabbed AlexNet as its a bit easier to work with and was readily available as a fine tunable model on the Caffe Model Zoo, but you're certainly right that VGG or Googlenet would give more accuracy.

For training on clouds vs snow and deserts, this is a bit more of a proof of concept for now based on the data we had access to (state of California). Someone could certainly scale this up using a larger data set and generating more annotation data with examples of snow and deserts to handle more edge conditions. They would probably want to build Mechanical Turk support into the annotation tool if they did.

Thanks for all the great comments! All of this is open source so contributions using any of these suggestions are certainly possible.

Best, Brad Neuberg

We did it before Deep Learning existed. If we had to do it again today from scratch, I think we'd use an approach similar to yours. My comment about VGG was based on experience with VGG vs AlexNet in other projects.

Very cool stuff! We have a lot of internal tools for automatically detecting clouds at Orbital Insight as clouds present a large challenge across many types of satellite resolutions and bands. Glad to see more people are turning towards deep learning for satellite imagery.

Curious to hear how long the pipeline takes to run on a single image? Also, have you thought about running the pipeline in a fully convolutional manner, reducing the need for proposal regions?

Tacking on a shameless recruiting plug: if you're interesting in computer vision, deep learning, and/or satellite imagery, Orbital Insight is hiring! http://orbitalinsight.com/jobs/machine_vision.html

[Cloudless developer here]

Hi Boris! It's Brad from Dropbox :)

Responding to the parent comment, in terms of running time, the primary bottleneck is the RCNN localization portion; that takes about a minute and a half on my laptop to process a single image. In the Future Work section of the blog post I talk about collapsing the entire detection and localization pipeline into a single deconvolution network that directly takes in raw images and outputs image masks. The hope is that this runs much faster at inference time.

Nice, but couldn't this be easier done with heuristics?

[Cloudless developer here]

It can certainly be done with hand rolled heuristics pipelines. However, one of the trends in machine learning is what is known as end to end learning - having your machine learning model automatically discover what these heuristics are going from raw input to final output. This approach now dominates in computer vision and speech understanding, replacing previously complicated hand rolled feature pipelines. It's worth attempting it on satelittle imagery as it seems the same approach should be valid there too.

Best, Brad Neuberg

Interesting project. Question: do the the authors have any background in meteorology? The satellite meteorology community maybe interested in this. I am at AMS this week in NOLA where there will be various talks on machine learning applied to meteorology[1]. There have been advancements in this area from groups who possess no domain knowledge and simply approach the problem from the big data side.

[1] https://ams.confex.com/ams/96Annual/webprogram/start.html#sr...

[Cloudless developer here]

Our backgrounds are more in machine learning and computer science than metereorology, so that aspect was new to us. As you mention we were mostly approaching the problem from having more data and tools like neural networks to throw at the problem.

Best, Brad Neuberg

FYI a technical article with a full write up on Cloudless is here: http://codinginparadise.org/ebooks/html/blog/introducing_clo...

I'm wondering if a similar approach be used to detect oil spills in the ocean. What would be the challenges ?

The primary challenge is collecting enough training data to teach the neural network.

Landsat data has a field which gives cloud cover percent for the image. Do you know how that derive that number?

Landsat7 is trivial to do this, it has a thermal infrared sensor which is definitely not present on the RapidEye constellation.

[Cloudless developer here]

I believe the Landsat cover percent field is generated by humans and historical information, but I'm not completely sure.

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