Abstract:

Satellite imagery is important for many applications including disaster response, law enforcement and environmental monitoring. These applications require the manual identification of objects and facilities in the imagery. Because the geographic expanses to be covered are great and the analysts available to conduct the searches are few, automation is required. Yet traditional object detection and classification algorithms are too inaccurate and unreliable to solve the problem. Deep learning is a family of machine learning algorithms that have shown promise for the automation of such tasks. It has achieved success in image understanding by means of convolutional neural networks. The problem of object and facility recognition in satellite imagery is considered. The system consists of an ensemble of convolutional neural networks and additional neural networks at integrate satellite metadata with image features.