Kyle Story

Aidan M. Swope, Xander H. Rudelis, Kyle T. Story

In the application of machine learning to remote sensing, labeled data is often scarce or expensive, which impedes the training of powerful models like deep convolutional neural networks. Although unlabeled data is abundant, recent self-supervised learning approaches are ill-suited to the remote sensing domain. In addition, most remote sensing applications currently use only a small subset of the multi-sensor, multi-channel information available, motivating the need for fused multi-sensor representations. We propose a new self-supervised training objective, Contrastive Sensor Fusion, which exploits coterminous data from multiple sources to learn useful representations of every possible combination of those sources. This method uses information common across multiple sensors and bands by training a single model to produce a representation that remains similar when any subset of its input channels is used. Using a dataset of 47 million unlabeled coterminous image triplets, we train an encoder to produce semantically meaningful representations from any possible combination of channels from the input sensors. These representations outperform fully supervised ImageNet weights on a remote sensing classification task and improve as more sensors are fused. Our code is available at https://storage.cloud.google.com/public-published-datasets/csf_code.zip.

Hao Sheng, Jeremy Irvin, Sasankh Munukutla et al.

At least a quarter of the warming that the Earth is experiencing today is due to anthropogenic methane emissions. There are multiple satellites in orbit and planned for launch in the next few years which can detect and quantify these emissions; however, to attribute methane emissions to their sources on the ground, a comprehensive database of the locations and characteristics of emission sources worldwide is essential. In this work, we develop deep learning algorithms that leverage freely available high-resolution aerial imagery to automatically detect oil and gas infrastructure, one of the largest contributors to global methane emissions. We use the best algorithm, which we call OGNet, together with expert review to identify the locations of oil refineries and petroleum terminals in the U.S. We show that OGNet detects many facilities which are not present in four standard public datasets of oil and gas infrastructure. All detected facilities are associated with characteristics known to contribute to methane emissions, including the infrastructure type and the number of storage tanks. The data curated and produced in this study is freely available at http://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/projects/ognet .

Jeremy Irvin, Hao Sheng, Neel Ramachandran et al.

Characterizing the processes leading to deforestation is critical to the development and implementation of targeted forest conservation and management policies. In this work, we develop a deep learning model called ForestNet to classify the drivers of primary forest loss in Indonesia, a country with one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. Using satellite imagery, ForestNet identifies the direct drivers of deforestation in forest loss patches of any size. We curate a dataset of Landsat 8 satellite images of known forest loss events paired with driver annotations from expert interpreters. We use the dataset to train and validate the models and demonstrate that ForestNet substantially outperforms other standard driver classification approaches. In order to support future research on automated approaches to deforestation driver classification, the dataset curated in this study is publicly available at https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/projects/forestnet .