Latest / Satellite image deep learning / Earthquake detection with Sentinel-1
Transcript
- 0:05SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome to the Satellite Image Deep Learning Podcast.
- 0:08SPEAKER_01: I'm Robin Cole and it's my pleasure to present another technically focused episode in the series.
- 0:13SPEAKER_01: In this episode,
- 0:14SPEAKER_01: I caught up with Daniela Rege-Cambrian to learn about earthquake epicentre
- 0:18SPEAKER_01: detection with Sentinel-1 images.
- 0:20SPEAKER_01: Daniela has a key role in organising a new competition on this task.
- 0:24SPEAKER_01: We had a great discussion about the logistics of this competition and the lessons
- 0:28SPEAKER_01: he learned from organising a previous one.
- 0:31SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoy this episode.
- 0:32SPEAKER_01: Hi Daniela, welcome to the podcast.
- 0:34SPEAKER_01: How are you?
- 0:36SPEAKER_00: Thanks for the invitation, and I'm glad to be here with you.
- 0:41SPEAKER_00: And yeah, really thanks.
- 0:43SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
- 0:44SPEAKER_01: Now, I know you from your involvement in the ChadBud challenge.
- 0:47SPEAKER_01: Do you mind telling us a bit about that challenge?
- 0:50SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the last year, we ran a machine learning competition in ECML pick-up that we did.
- 0:57SPEAKER_00: And it was a great experience from a point of view.
- 1:01SPEAKER_00: It was quite interesting for us learning how to run competitions,
- 1:09SPEAKER_00: to deal with people,
- 1:10SPEAKER_00: deal with technical issues,
- 1:12SPEAKER_00: etc.
- 1:13SPEAKER_00: It was mainly...
- 1:14SPEAKER_00: about some topics on remote sensing.
- 1:18SPEAKER_00: In particular, we focused on a problem that was quite, I mean, explored.
- 1:24SPEAKER_00: It was burnout detection, mainly.
- 1:28SPEAKER_00: In this case, we want to address the delineation problem, so segmenting the areas.
- 1:34SPEAKER_00: And so we collected, I think, a reasonable number of people, 20, 30 people or less.
- 1:40SPEAKER_00: So we
- 1:42SPEAKER_00: I have to deal with a reasonable number of people,
- 1:44SPEAKER_00: not too much large people,
- 1:46SPEAKER_00: but it's quite challenging from a first experience point of view,
- 1:50SPEAKER_00: I will say.
- 1:51SPEAKER_00: And yeah, now help to go for another run about another competition.
- 2:00SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that challenge was segmenting fire burned areas.
- 2:03SPEAKER_01: I'm just curious, how did it work?
- 2:07SPEAKER_01: Like how did people innovate their solutions?
- 2:11SPEAKER_01: Did they take the baseline and make iterations or did you see completely different solutions emerge?
- 2:17SPEAKER_00: So from what I've seen, mainly people have not changed too much the baseline.
- 2:23SPEAKER_00: They tried different solutions that are completely different from what we proposed.
- 2:30SPEAKER_00: Some people try to start with the classical indexes,
- 2:33SPEAKER_00: for example,
- 2:35SPEAKER_00: or other classical machine learning algorithms.
- 2:38SPEAKER_00: It seems to me they
- 2:41SPEAKER_00: These indexes and classical solutions do not provide any good results,
- 2:45SPEAKER_00: at least from what I've seen from the leaderboard,
- 2:48SPEAKER_00: I would say.
- 2:50SPEAKER_00: And the other people focused on,
- 2:53SPEAKER_00: for example,
- 2:54SPEAKER_00: more unit-like architecture,
- 2:56SPEAKER_00: I will say,
- 2:57SPEAKER_00: and their variation.
- 2:59SPEAKER_00: And also they tried to work with the different spectral bands of the images.
- 3:06SPEAKER_00: For example,
- 3:07SPEAKER_00: one of the winners focused only on the false composite color,
- 3:11SPEAKER_00: for example,
- 3:12SPEAKER_00: without using all the available channels in the images.
- 3:15SPEAKER_01: This is Sentinel-2 channels, was it?
- 3:18SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was 12 channels because we used the images from Sentinel, too.
- 3:23SPEAKER_00: So we have both RGB and infrared and also an ultra-blue channel, if you remember well.
- 3:31SPEAKER_00: But yeah, people tried to improve and use other solutions from UNetLife.
- 3:37SPEAKER_00: Our baseline was a simple DeepLab v3, if you know the model.
- 3:42SPEAKER_00: And yeah, they...
- 3:44SPEAKER_00: do pretty good i will say since they beat the baseline on 20 points i will say so
- 3:54SPEAKER_01: So successful outcome for yourself as organizers of the competition.
- 4:00SPEAKER_01: Good quality solutions on that task.
- 4:04SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I will say they work at least.
- 4:07SPEAKER_00: So this is important for sure if we are doing some applicative,
- 4:11SPEAKER_00: I will say,
- 4:12SPEAKER_00: some application of current machine learning.
- 4:14SPEAKER_00: So they work at least.
- 4:16SPEAKER_00: They propose some good solution without,
- 4:17SPEAKER_00: for example,
- 4:18SPEAKER_00: as I said,
- 4:19SPEAKER_00: using every data disposal,
- 4:21SPEAKER_00: every channel disposal.
- 4:22SPEAKER_00: So they...
- 4:23SPEAKER_00: The innovator will say,
- 4:25SPEAKER_00: using only a part of the data,
- 4:27SPEAKER_00: this is good since this means that you don't really need everything that is
- 4:33SPEAKER_00: available from our point of view.
- 4:37SPEAKER_00: And yes, as I said, I was quite satisfied from the results since they beat our results, I would say.
- 4:47SPEAKER_00: So this is a good point.
- 4:52SPEAKER_01: Was there a particular metric that they were judged on?
- 4:56SPEAKER_00: They tried to maximize the classical intersection over union, I would say.
- 5:01SPEAKER_00: This is a binary problem, so it was quite good to evaluate the intersection over union.
- 5:08SPEAKER_00: And yeah, as I said, I've not seen any ensemble, big ensemble, more or less.
- 5:15SPEAKER_00: So this was a point that we tried to force people using a small model as possible to
- 5:26SPEAKER_00: improve existing models, use existing models without simply saying we assembled 10 models.
- 5:33SPEAKER_00: And yeah, for sure, building more models is good than using a single one.
- 5:37SPEAKER_00: But we forced, I think, a constraint to not use more than one GPU.
- 5:45SPEAKER_00: I would say it's arbitrary.
- 5:47SPEAKER_00: I would say since a GPU can have 80 gigabyte or 40 or 12 or well,
- 5:55SPEAKER_00: was simply a manner to avoid people using, as I said, larger samples.
- 6:01SPEAKER_01: Right.
- 6:01SPEAKER_01: So I think the challenge there is,
- 6:03SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 6:03SPEAKER_01: individuals might not have the same resources as a team,
- 6:06SPEAKER_01: a large organization.
- 6:08SPEAKER_01: So you're trying to level the playing field a bit there and,
- 6:11SPEAKER_01: I guess,
- 6:12SPEAKER_01: get a bit more engagement as a result.
- 6:14SPEAKER_00: Yes,
- 6:15SPEAKER_00: as you said,
- 6:16SPEAKER_00: people have to be,
- 6:17SPEAKER_00: I mean,
- 6:18SPEAKER_00: they must have the same instrumentation,
- 6:21SPEAKER_00: the same abilities to...
- 6:25SPEAKER_00: It's a game,
- 6:26SPEAKER_00: more or less.
- 6:27SPEAKER_00: So every people have to...
- 6:29SPEAKER_00: be in the same setting of other people to play right and fair with others.
- 6:35SPEAKER_00: Everyone has the possibility to win.
- 6:37SPEAKER_00: I'm quite passionate in game and I know this.
- 6:40SPEAKER_01: That's fantastic.
- 6:41SPEAKER_01: And so you've moved on to another competition this year.
- 6:43SPEAKER_01: Do you mind telling us what that one is about?
- 6:45SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
- 6:46SPEAKER_00: as you mentioned,
- 6:47SPEAKER_00: we want to run another competition on a different topic that I think is more under
- 6:53SPEAKER_00: explored is linked to earthquakes this year.
- 6:57SPEAKER_00: So we want to focus on their detection,
- 7:00SPEAKER_00: in particular to the detection of the epicenter,
- 7:04SPEAKER_00: mainly since from what I've learned from literature and other people working in geophysics,
- 7:10SPEAKER_00: et cetera,
- 7:10SPEAKER_00: et cetera,
- 7:12SPEAKER_00: uh currently is quite time consuming from what i've learned you need more stations
- 7:18SPEAKER_00: and each station have to detect the waves and then to detect the epicenter you have
- 7:23SPEAKER_00: to combine all the
- 7:26SPEAKER_00: detection of the different stations to understand where is the epicenter.
- 7:32SPEAKER_00: So it seems more time consuming,
- 7:35SPEAKER_00: while in this case simply having an image and then say the epicenter is here,
- 7:42SPEAKER_00: is not here.
- 7:44SPEAKER_01: So hopefully we can come up with a solution that just takes satellite images rather
- 7:50SPEAKER_01: than doing what is triangulation with ground sensors,
- 7:53SPEAKER_01: right?
- 7:54SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
- 7:55SPEAKER_00: we have also seen people working with these type of images from Sentinel-1 to
- 8:01SPEAKER_00: detect the area affected by earthquakes manually,
- 8:05SPEAKER_00: I will say.
- 8:06SPEAKER_00: So this seems feasible.
- 8:09SPEAKER_00: using the SAR instrument for this type of challenges, I will say.
- 8:14SPEAKER_00: So understanding earthquakes.
- 8:18SPEAKER_00: This is why now we have to propose a baseline.
- 8:22SPEAKER_00: I already tried something and it should work.
- 8:26SPEAKER_00: I hope people will try to propose a better solution for sure.
- 8:32SPEAKER_00: Since, as I said, they could be useful to
- 8:37SPEAKER_00: the humanity will say in this case, but also to geophysics, et cetera, et cetera.
- 8:43SPEAKER_01: So the gauntlet is thrown down,
- 8:44SPEAKER_01: a more challenging task potentially,
- 8:46SPEAKER_01: and a different sensor this time,
- 8:49SPEAKER_01: Sentinel-1 being the SAR sensor,
- 8:50SPEAKER_01: of course.
- 8:52SPEAKER_01: And what kind of data do you provide?
- 8:53SPEAKER_01: Is it a single image?
- 8:54SPEAKER_01: Is it a time series?
- 8:57SPEAKER_01: Francesco D' Okay,
- 8:58SPEAKER_00: as as done in the previous year we focused on to be temporal time series,
- 9:04SPEAKER_00: it will say so,
- 9:05SPEAKER_00: two images if you prefer calling them in this way,
- 9:12SPEAKER_00: and this is done because this is done because.
- 9:17SPEAKER_00: from our experimentation,
- 9:18SPEAKER_00: but also from other people's experimentation in manual,
- 9:22SPEAKER_00: I would say,
- 9:23SPEAKER_00: detection of these hazards,
- 9:28SPEAKER_00: you need two images because you need the interferogram if I'm
- 9:32SPEAKER_00: calling it well you are better than me in this and so yes also in this case we want
- 9:41SPEAKER_00: to be what people focusing on change detection i will say that oriented in this way
- 9:49SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just to summarize there, you obviously have a before and after SAR image.
- 9:53SPEAKER_01: The ground has moved.
- 9:54SPEAKER_01: You can do this, generate an interferogram, as you say, which will tell you how the ground has changed.
- 9:59SPEAKER_01: So presumably people will be using single image with interferogram.
- 10:04SPEAKER_01: And then the actual annotated data, you said it's the center of the epicenter of the
- 10:11SPEAKER_01: the earthquake, so is it a point, is it a segmentation mask?
- 10:14SPEAKER_00: It's a point, as you said, since the epicentre is one point.
- 10:18SPEAKER_00: Our,
- 10:20SPEAKER_00: I mean,
- 10:20SPEAKER_00: trustable source,
- 10:21SPEAKER_00: I would say,
- 10:21SPEAKER_00: that is the International Seismological Centre,
- 10:26SPEAKER_00: so we can trust them,
- 10:27SPEAKER_00: I hope.
- 10:28SPEAKER_00: And from their data, we tried to map all the epicenters on images, I will say.
- 10:35SPEAKER_00: So yes, as I said, you have to regress a single point.
- 10:38SPEAKER_00: But I think it's not really straightforward, as you said before.
- 10:42SPEAKER_00: Seems more complex than simply segmenting, for example.
- 10:48SPEAKER_00: Since you can rely on visual features, while SAR, as you mentioned, is not really
- 10:56SPEAKER_00: a picture, an image is more radiometric, if I'm calling this type of image as well.
- 11:06SPEAKER_01: Well, that sounds like a really interesting task.
- 11:08SPEAKER_01: I'm really looking forward to seeing the solutions people come up with.
- 11:11SPEAKER_01: And as you say, something a bit more, I think, involved than just segmentation.
- 11:15SPEAKER_01: Obviously, this is your second competition.
- 11:18SPEAKER_01: I'm curious, what's it like organizing these competitions, running them?
- 11:22SPEAKER_01: Did you learn anything significant in the first one that you're going to change the
- 11:26SPEAKER_01: way you run the second one?
- 11:28SPEAKER_00: So from our point of view, I think we will change the platform.
- 11:34SPEAKER_00: So this is not really linked to our previous competition,
- 11:39SPEAKER_00: I will say,
- 11:40SPEAKER_00: but it's a change from our point of view.
- 11:43SPEAKER_00: We have to learn to deal with another type of management.
- 11:47SPEAKER_00: Also, as I said, from our previous competition, from what I've seen, at least,
- 11:58SPEAKER_00: I would say you are not busy for all the time of the competition.
- 12:05SPEAKER_00: You have really low effort times and other times you have to deal with many things.
- 12:13SPEAKER_00: Since at the beginning you have to release something, then you have to...
- 12:19SPEAKER_00: give people time to deal with your data,
- 12:22SPEAKER_00: then you have to release the test,
- 12:24SPEAKER_00: you have to deal with the final part in collecting all the results,
- 12:28SPEAKER_00: understand their reports,
- 12:31SPEAKER_00: for example,
- 12:32SPEAKER_00: try to,
- 12:33SPEAKER_00: yeah,
- 12:33SPEAKER_00: you know,
- 12:34SPEAKER_00: there are many things that they will take in account.
- 12:37SPEAKER_00: At least in dealing with 30 people, as I said, 20 people.
- 12:41SPEAKER_00: Probably if 100 people is not the same.
- 12:44SPEAKER_00: I've also taken part in some other competitions.
- 12:46SPEAKER_00: So I'm pretty sure that larger competition are more complex.
- 12:51SPEAKER_00: But as I said,
- 12:52SPEAKER_00: since our goal is not simply dedicate all our time into this competition,
- 12:59SPEAKER_00: but letting people try solving interesting problems,
- 13:05SPEAKER_00: probably.
- 13:08SPEAKER_00: We have to manage our time in dealing with the pollution and other things.
- 13:14SPEAKER_00: So this is, I think, if you want to run a competition, you must have in mind that these type of things.
- 13:21SPEAKER_00: So there are moments in which you have
- 13:25SPEAKER_00: you are involved more in the competition,
- 13:29SPEAKER_00: in dealing with things other times in which you have to do nothing.
- 13:33SPEAKER_00: So this is a point that you have to take into account.
- 13:37SPEAKER_00: Other problem is releasing the things that is not so straightforward because also
- 13:44SPEAKER_00: speaking to another guy he told me the size of the things have to be comfortable
- 13:51SPEAKER_00: for people because as you said probably are
- 13:56SPEAKER_00: common people, not big societies, big companies.
- 13:58SPEAKER_00: So they have to deal easily with your data, with models.
- 14:03SPEAKER_00: They have to be fair to competition, as you said.
- 14:06SPEAKER_00: So it's not so straightforward.
- 14:08SPEAKER_00: We have to think,
- 14:08SPEAKER_00: well,
- 14:09SPEAKER_00: which are the constraints you want to pose,
- 14:12SPEAKER_00: if they are feasible,
- 14:13SPEAKER_00: if you could evaluate the results well.
- 14:17SPEAKER_00: So there are many points that I've heard.
- 14:19SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 14:20SPEAKER_01: Okay, so a few lessons learned around the organization and scheduling, I suppose.
- 14:26SPEAKER_01: Change of platform.
- 14:27SPEAKER_01: Which platform are you going to be hosting this competition on then?
- 14:29SPEAKER_00: So probably we will go for QuotaLab.
- 14:32SPEAKER_00: That is quite well renowned, I think, this year.
- 14:36SPEAKER_00: Since, as I said, the point is simply progressing a point.
- 14:41SPEAKER_00: So it will be more straightforward for people sending their questions
- 14:48SPEAKER_00: uh i would say their predictions and it is easier for us uh evaluating their
- 14:55SPEAKER_00: results so i would say we will go for quota this is free for these type of
- 15:01SPEAKER_00: challenges is it is working
- 15:04SPEAKER_01: And do people, do they submit code?
- 15:07SPEAKER_01: Do they submit model weights?
- 15:08SPEAKER_01: Do they somehow, you know, generate some predictions that you evaluate?
- 15:14SPEAKER_00: So for sure they have to submit the predictions.
- 15:16SPEAKER_00: Also this year we would like to,
- 15:19SPEAKER_00: also the previous year,
- 15:20SPEAKER_00: we suggested people opening their code for evaluation with
- 15:25SPEAKER_00: have not run their code.
- 15:30SPEAKER_00: This year instead, we would like to understand better the resource consumption of their models.
- 15:39SPEAKER_00: We want to prove that, I will say, bigger is not better, I will say.
- 15:45SPEAKER_00: So also from my experimentation,
- 15:48SPEAKER_00: from my understanding,
- 15:50SPEAKER_00: empirical understanding,
- 15:53SPEAKER_00: I will say these tasks are not so complex.
- 15:57SPEAKER_00: And so you don't really need to involve, for example, I will say, same like or something similar.
- 16:03SPEAKER_00: Using the mobile net, you got good results.
- 16:07SPEAKER_00: So forcing people in using low results models will be a constraint to force people
- 16:15SPEAKER_00: simply not saying,
- 16:16SPEAKER_00: I will go for bigger models,
- 16:18SPEAKER_00: as I said,
- 16:19SPEAKER_00: and
- 16:19SPEAKER_00: I think everyone could take part with us or a simple GPU with classical things.
- 16:29SPEAKER_01: Just one question.
- 16:30SPEAKER_01: If they're providing the predictions, that means they have access to the test dataset.
- 16:34SPEAKER_01: How do you prevent people overfitting the dataset?
- 16:37SPEAKER_00: In the first part, we will provide, as done in the previous year, only public validation, I will say.
- 16:44SPEAKER_00: Also, in this case, we will provide
- 16:48SPEAKER_00: the ground truth, I would say, also for the public.
- 16:53SPEAKER_00: But since it's more like a self-devaluation,
- 16:56SPEAKER_00: I would say,
- 16:57SPEAKER_00: and to let know if you want other people how you are performing,
- 17:03SPEAKER_00: it's like a way to...
- 17:07SPEAKER_00: force people in saying i'm doing better than you so keep the challenge running and
- 17:15SPEAKER_00: doing better this is simply the rationale i would say around the decision and from
- 17:21SPEAKER_00: my point of view i think it can work and also from the previous year i've seen that
- 17:27SPEAKER_00: people are submitting try to
- 17:29SPEAKER_00: doing better.
- 17:30SPEAKER_00: Some people have overfitted,
- 17:32SPEAKER_00: but at a certain point,
- 17:34SPEAKER_00: it could be clear,
- 17:35SPEAKER_00: since if you go up 90%,
- 17:38SPEAKER_00: I would say,
- 17:39SPEAKER_00: it can be suspicious.
- 17:43SPEAKER_00: And instead,
- 17:43SPEAKER_00: for the real private test set,
- 17:45SPEAKER_00: we are simply releasing the data without the prediction,
- 17:50SPEAKER_00: as done in the previous year,
- 17:51SPEAKER_00: so people cannot overfit in any case.
- 17:55SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
- 17:56SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, thank you for the overview and the history of the series.
- 17:59SPEAKER_01: Why don't you tell us the basics when the competition begins?
- 18:02SPEAKER_01: When does it end?
- 18:04SPEAKER_01: So,
- 18:05SPEAKER_00: for now,
- 18:06SPEAKER_00: we have to deal with the proposal,
- 18:08SPEAKER_00: since we are waiting,
- 18:10SPEAKER_00: it should be in these weeks,
- 18:13SPEAKER_00: I will say the call for the proposals.
- 18:20SPEAKER_00: And then if
- 18:23SPEAKER_00: The timeline is the same of the previous year from March, April until the end of the summer, I will say.
- 18:33SPEAKER_01: Okay, so spring and 2024 ending in summer.
- 18:38SPEAKER_00: Yeah, according to the previous year, as I said.
- 18:41SPEAKER_00: I don't know this year, but I hope they will come to us with the deadlines for expectations.
- 18:49SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
- 18:50SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, I'll include the details for the competition in the show notes.
- 18:54SPEAKER_01: People can check them out there.
- 18:55SPEAKER_01: If people want to follow you personally, Daniele, what's the best platform?
- 18:59SPEAKER_00: Following me, you said?
- 19:01SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 19:02SPEAKER_00: You can follow me probably...
- 19:04SPEAKER_00: Yeah, searching for me on the internet is my name and surname, Daniele Rege Cambrin.
- 19:10SPEAKER_00: It's unique.
- 19:11SPEAKER_00: I'm the only one with this name.
- 19:13SPEAKER_00: So you can easily, I will say, you can reach me by email.
- 19:18SPEAKER_00: You can find me on Discord or other social LinkedIn, for example.
- 19:23SPEAKER_00: You can follow me.
- 19:25SPEAKER_00: uh or what do you prefer as i said i'm also a game passionate so you can find me on
- 19:29SPEAKER_00: a game platform i would say oh okay people are quite passionate and want to play
- 19:35SPEAKER_01: yes that's another invite then two competitions are running yeah yeah yeah for sure
- 19:40SPEAKER_00: for sure as i said i'm really passionate this is why i'm running this competition
- 19:44SPEAKER_01: it's like a game i like games that's great wonderful well once again thanks again
- 19:50SPEAKER_01: and uh looking forward to the competition
- 19:53SPEAKER_00: Okay, thanks.
- 19:54SPEAKER_00: I hope to see many people this year as in the previous year.
- 19:58SPEAKER_00: And thanks to you,
- 19:59SPEAKER_00: Robin,
- 20:00SPEAKER_00: for the invitation and to discuss with you about these topics and new things,
- 20:07SPEAKER_00: I would say,
- 20:07SPEAKER_00: in machine learning field.
- 20:10SPEAKER_01: It's my pleasure.
- 20:10SPEAKER_01: Okay, ciao.
- 20:12SPEAKER_00: Ciao.