Samuel T. Thiele

Elias Arbash, Andréa de Lima Ribeiro, Sam Thiele et al.

The presence of undesired background areas associated with potential noise and unknown spectral characteristics degrades the performance of hyperspectral data processing. Masking out unwanted regions is key to addressing this issue. Processing only regions of interest yields notable improvements in terms of computational costs, required memory, and overall performance. The proposed processing pipeline encompasses two fundamental parts: regions of interest mask generation, followed by the application of hyperspectral data processing techniques solely on the newly masked hyperspectral cube. The novelty of our work lies in the methodology adopted for the preliminary image segmentation. We employ the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to extract all objects within the dataset, and subsequently refine the segments with a zero-shot Grounding Dino object detector, followed by intersection and exclusion filtering steps, without the need for fine-tuning or retraining. To illustrate the efficacy of the masking procedure, the proposed method is deployed on three challenging applications scenarios that demand accurate masking; shredded plastics characterization, drill core scanning, and litter monitoring. The numerical evaluation of the proposed masking method on the three applications is provided along with the used hyperparameters. The scripts for the method will be available at https://github.com/hifexplo/Masking.

Ahmed J. Afifi, Samuel T. Thiele, Aldino Rizaldy et al.

The increasing use of deep learning techniques has reduced interpretation time and, ideally, reduced interpreter bias by automatically deriving geological maps from digital outcrop models. However, accurate validation of these automated mapping approaches is a significant challenge due to the subjective nature of geological mapping and the difficulty in collecting quantitative validation data. Additionally, many state-of-the-art deep learning methods are limited to 2D image data, which is insufficient for 3D digital outcrops, such as hyperclouds. To address these challenges, we present Tinto, a multi-sensor benchmark digital outcrop dataset designed to facilitate the development and validation of deep learning approaches for geological mapping, especially for non-structured 3D data like point clouds. Tinto comprises two complementary sets: 1) a real digital outcrop model from Corta Atalaya (Spain), with spectral attributes and ground-truth data, and 2) a synthetic twin that uses latent features in the original datasets to reconstruct realistic spectral data (including sensor noise and processing artifacts) from the ground-truth. The point cloud is dense and contains 3,242,964 labeled points. We used these datasets to explore the abilities of different deep learning approaches for automated geological mapping. By making Tinto publicly available, we hope to foster the development and adaptation of new deep learning tools for 3D applications in Earth sciences. The dataset can be accessed through this link: https://doi.org/10.14278/rodare.2256.