Satellite image deep learning Robin Cole

In this episode I caught up with Samuel Bancroft to learn about segmenting field boundaries using Segment Anything, aka SAM. SAM is a foundational model for vision released by Meta, which is capable of zero shot segmentation. However there are many open questions about how to make use of SAM with remote sensing imagery.
In this conversation, Samuel describes how he used SAM to perform segmentation of field boundaries using Sentinel 2 imagery over the UK. His best results were obtained not by fine tuning SAM, but by carefully pre-processing a time series of images into HSV colour space, and using SAM without any modifications. This is a surprising result, and using this kind of approach significantly reduces the amount of work necessary to develop useful remote sensing applications utilising SAM. You can view the recording of this conversation on YouTube here
- Samuel on LinkedIn
- https://github.com/Spiruel/UKFields
Bio: Sam Bancroft is a final year PhD student at the University of Leeds. He is assessing future food production using satellite data and machine learning. This involves exploring new self- and semi- supervised deep learning approaches that help in producing more reliable and scalable crop type maps for major crops worldwide. He is a keen supporter in democratising access to models and datasets in Earth Observation and machine learning.


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In this episode I caught up with Yotam Azriel to learn about interpretable deep learning. Deep learning models are often criticised for being "black box" due to their complex architectures and large number of parameters. Model interpretability is crucial as it enables stakeholders to make informed decisions based on insights into how predictions were made. I think this is an important topic and I learned a lot about the sophisticated techniques and engineering required to develop a platform for model interpretability. You can also view the video of this recording on YouTube.
* tensorleap.ai
* Yotam on Linkedin
Bio: Yotam is an expert in machine and deep learning, with ten years of experience in these fields. He has been involved in massive military and government development projects, as well as with startups. Yotam developed and led AI projects from research to production and he also acts as a professional consultant to companies developing AI. His expertise includes image and video recognition, NLP, algo-trading, and signal analysis. Yotam is an autodidact with strong leadership qualities and great communication skills.



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In this episode I caught up with Daniele Rege Cambrin, to learn about Earthquake detection with Sentinel-1 (SAR) images. Daniele has a key role in organising a new competition on this task, SMAC: Seismic Monitoring and Analysis Challenge. The topics covered include the logistics of organising this competition, and the lessons Daniele learned from organising a previous one. You can also view the recording of this discussion on YouTube.
- Daniele on LinkedIn
- Competition website
Bio: Daniele Rege Cambrin is currently pursuing his Ph.D. and his research interests lie in deep learning. He is particularly interested in finding efficient and scalable solutions in areas such as remote sensing, computer vision, and natural language processing. Additionally, he has a keen interest in game development, and worked on two machine-learning competitions related to change detection.


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In this episode Robin catches up with Inon Sharony to learn about the fascinating world of machine learning with SAR imagery. The unique attributes of SAR imagery, such as its intensity, phase, and polarisation, provide rich information for deep learning models to learn features from. The discussion covers the innovative applications ASTERRA is developing, and the nuances of machine learning with SAR imagery. This video of this episode is available on YouTube
* https://asterra.io/
* https://www.linkedin.com/in/inonsharony/
Bio: Inon Sharony is the Head of AI at ASTERRA, where he is responsible for pushing boundaries in the field of deep learning for earth observation. Sharony brings a decade of experience leading development of cutting-edge AI technology that meets real-world business and product needs. His previous roles include Algorithm Group Manager at Rail Vision Ltd and R&D Group Lead & Head of Automotive Intelligence at L4B Software. He was PhD trained in Chemical Physics at Tel Aviv University and combines his extensive academic background in Physics and his hands-on experience with machine learning to develop strategic AI solutions for ASTERRA.


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In this episode, Robin catches up up with Alistair Francis and Mikolaj Czerkawski to learn about Major TOM, which is a significant new public dataset of Sentinel 2 imagery. Noteworthy for its immense size at 45 TB, Major TOM also introduces a set of standards for dataset filtering and integration with other datasets. Their aim in releasing this dataset is to foster a community-centred ecosystem of datasets, open to bias evaluation and adaptable to new domains and sensors. The potential of Major TOM to spur innovation in our field is truly exciting. Note you can also view the video of this recording on YouTube here. The video also includes a demonstration of accessing the dataset and a walkthrough of the associated Jupyter notebooks.
* Dataset on HuggingFace
* Paper
Alistair Francis is a Research Fellow at the European Space Agency’s Φ-lab in Frascati, Italy. Having studied for his PhD at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL, his research is focused on image analysis problems in remote sensing, using a variety of supervised, self-supervised and unsupervised approaches to tackle problems such as cloud masking, crater detection and land use mapping. Through this work, he has been involved in the creation of several public datasets for both Earth Observation and planetary science.
Mikolaj Czerkawski is a Research Fellow at the European Space Agency’s Φ-lab in Frascati, Italy. He received the B.Eng. degree in electronic and electrical engineering in 2019 from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, United Kingdom, and the Ph.D. degree in 2023 at the same university, specialising in applications of computer vision to Earth observation data. His research interests include image synthesis, generative models, and use cases involving restoration tasks of satellite imagery. Furthermore, he is a keen supporter and contributor to open-access and open-source models and datasets in the domain of AI and Earth observation.


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In this video Robin catches up with Konstantin Klemmer to discus SatClip, which is a new global & general purpose location encoder trained on Sentinel 2 imagery. The conversation covered the training of encoders such as CLIP, and discussed the implications for downstream applications. Note you can also view the video of this recording on YouTube here
* Konstantin on LinkedIn
* SatCLIP
Bio: Konstantin is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England. His research interests lie broadly within geospatial machine learning and bridging adjacent domains like remote sensing or spatial statistics. Konstantin has a PhD from the University of Warwick and NYU, a Master's from Imperial College London and an undergraduate degree from the University of Freiburg, Germany.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.satellite-image-deep-learning.com