Julian Rice

Jonathan Ventura, Camille Pawlak, Milo Honsberger et al.

We introduce a novel deep learning method for detection of individual trees in urban environments using high-resolution multispectral aerial imagery. We use a convolutional neural network to regress a confidence map indicating the locations of individual trees, which are localized using a peak finding algorithm. Our method provides complete spatial coverage by detecting trees in both public and private spaces, and can scale to very large areas. We performed a thorough evaluation of our method, supported by a new dataset of over 1,500 images and almost 100,000 tree annotations, covering eight cities, six climate zones, and three image capture years. We trained our model on data from Southern California, and achieved a precision of 73.6% and recall of 73.3% using test data from this region. We generally observed similar precision and slightly lower recall when extrapolating to other California climate zones and image capture dates. We used our method to produce a map of trees in the entire urban forest of California, and estimated the total number of urban trees in California to be about 43.5 million. Our study indicates the potential for deep learning methods to support future urban forestry studies at unprecedented scales.

Julian Rice, Wenwei Xu, Andrew August

Accurately predicting sea-surface temperature weeks to months into the future is an important step toward long term weather forecasting. Standard atmosphere-ocean coupled numerical models provide accurate sea-surface forecasts on the scale of a few days to a few weeks, but many important weather systems require greater foresight. In this paper we propose machine-learning approaches sea-surface temperature forecasting that are accurate on the scale of dozens of weeks. Our approach is based in Koopman operator theory, a useful tool for dynamical systems modelling. With this approach, we predict sea surface temperature in the Gulf of Mexico up to 180 days into the future based on a present image of thermal conditions and three years of historical training data. We evaluate the combination of a basic Koopman method with a convolutional autoencoder, and a newly proposed "consistent Koopman" method, in various permutations. We show that the Koopman approach consistently outperforms baselines, and we discuss the utility of our additional assumptions and methods in this sea-surface temperature domain.