Earth observation

Monitoring and prediction of objects, hazard risks and streamlining of aerial surveys

Background

Optical images from drones or satellites and data captured by radar sensors from above contain enormous amounts of complex data. They have the potential to reveal valuable information about our planet and its surface that could be used automate terrain mapping or to predict objects and hazard risks such as vessels and potential oil spills at sea.

Main objective

For earth observation the planned innovations aim for improved methods for monitoring and prediction of hazard risks, object detection, and for surveying and mapping ground and sea from air through exploitation of remote sensing images from satellites, aircrafts and drones.

Challenges

Limited and inadequate training data is a general problem in remote sensing. Combination of multi-sensor data (e.g. from optical and radar sensors) and time dependencies is another key challenge. Modelling of contextual information may also enhance the performance, but important contextual issues like integration of physical properties have not yet been addressed.

These are some of the research challenges Visual Intelligence are addressing.

Highlighted publications

Modular Superpixel Tokenization in Vision Transformers
August 28, 2024
ViTs partition images into square patches to extract tokenized features. But is this necessarily an optimal way of partitioning images?