Latest / Satellite image deep learning / Tessera: A Temporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation
Transcript
- 0:05SPEAKER_00: Hi guys, welcome to the podcast.
- 0:08SPEAKER_00: Hi.
- 0:10SPEAKER_00: Let's begin with a brief introduction to yourselves.
- 0:13SPEAKER_01: So I'm Sadiq Jaffa.
- 0:15I'm an assistant research professor here in the Energy and
- 0:18Environment Group in the
- 0:20Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University
- 0:22of Cambridge.
- 0:23SPEAKER_01: I specialize in AI for climate and nature projects.
- 0:27SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
- 0:27SPEAKER_02: Frank, yourself?
- 0:29SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so hi, I'm Jampeng Feng, and also I go by Frank.
- 0:33I'm a second year PhD student from University of Cambridge from
- 0:37Department of Computer Science.
- 0:38And I've been working with SEDIC and also a bunch of other of
- 0:41my colleagues on,
- 0:42SPEAKER_02: you know,
- 0:43SPEAKER_02: Tessera,
- 0:44and also my research interests a lot in the intersection of AI
- 0:48and remote sensing.
- 0:49SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
- 0:50SPEAKER_00: Thank you both.
- 0:51SPEAKER_00: Let's begin with the name Tessera.
- 0:53SPEAKER_00: What does it mean?
- 0:53SPEAKER_00: What does it stand for?
- 0:55SPEAKER_01: Oh, no.
- 0:56SPEAKER_01: Can we remember what the Bacronym is?
- 0:59SPEAKER_01: The Bacronym?
- 1:02SPEAKER_01: Temporal Embeddings.
- 1:03SPEAKER_01: It's on the paper title.
- 1:05I think it's Temporal Embeddings for Earth Surfaces,
- 1:10for Earth Representations and Analysis.
- 1:14SPEAKER_02: So in short, it's Tessera.
- 1:16SPEAKER_00: I like the name, to be honest.
- 1:18SPEAKER_00: Let's begin with the temporal bit.
- 1:19SPEAKER_00: What's special about this model?
- 1:24SPEAKER_02: Do you want to start first?
- 1:26SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 1:26So,
- 1:26um,
- 1:27so,
- 1:28uh,
- 1:28the temporal in the sense that,
- 1:30um,
- 1:30it's not a point in time snapshot.
- 1:33SPEAKER_01: Um,
- 1:33the embeddings are annualized embeddings that give you the
- 1:38temporal temporal
- 1:39SPEAKER_01: spectral characteristics of that particular point of earth over one year.
- 1:44SPEAKER_01: So, and we'd use a calendar year.
- 1:47SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
- 1:48SPEAKER_00: So if you wanted to compare change from one year to the next,
- 1:50SPEAKER_00: this is the logical way to segment.
- 1:53SPEAKER_01: Yep.
- 1:54SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
- 1:54SPEAKER_00: And what does it mean in practical terms,
- 1:56SPEAKER_00: in terms of the data that's available,
- 1:58SPEAKER_00: maybe how you train the model,
- 1:59SPEAKER_00: et cetera?
- 2:00SPEAKER_01: So,
- 2:01SPEAKER_01: I mean,
- 2:01SPEAKER_01: the reason why we capture that temporal,
- 2:05SPEAKER_01: those temporal characteristics is for things like plants,
- 2:08SPEAKER_01: the phenology,
- 2:09how the spectral characteristics of those plants change over
- 2:12the year are very
- 2:13SPEAKER_01: distinctive.
- 2:14SPEAKER_01: And so by kind of capturing it over a year,
- 2:17SPEAKER_01: we're able to discriminate things,
- 2:18which if you just took a point in time snapshot from one
- 2:22capture from Sentinel-2,
- 2:23you wouldn't be able to discriminate between two different
- 2:28plants that are very
- 2:28SPEAKER_01: close by.
- 2:29SPEAKER_01: In terms of training,
- 2:31it does mean that we need to pull down a lot of data because
- 2:36every inference run we
- 2:37do to produce embeddings for a year requires us to download the
- 2:40entire year's worth
- 2:41SPEAKER_01: of data for that particular point.
- 2:44SPEAKER_00: Makes sense.
- 2:45SPEAKER_00: And you chose which modalities?
- 2:48SPEAKER_02: So we use... I think probably I can answer this.
- 2:52So I think one thing I want to add to the previous question is
- 2:58that actually we
- 2:59SPEAKER_02: need to download basically all the Sensor 1,
- 3:01SPEAKER_02: Sensor 2 data.
- 3:02SPEAKER_02: So that also answers your third question.
- 3:05SPEAKER_02: So we use Sensor 1, Sensor 2.
- 3:07And so since the Tessera is a temporal model,
- 3:11and also we put down the whole year data.
- 3:13SPEAKER_02: And right now we're doing embeddings from 2017 to 2025.
- 3:17So that means we have to put down all the available like
- 3:20Sentinel-1,
- 3:20Sentinel-2 data.
- 3:22SPEAKER_02: I think that would be over 25 petabyte of data.
- 3:25SPEAKER_02: So it's like a massive huge amount of data and we're doing.
- 3:30SPEAKER_00: And do you just train on all of it or do you have to curate it somehow?
- 3:34So in training,
- 3:34we select actually over 3,000 MGRS tiles across the globe.
- 3:42SPEAKER_02: And also, when choosing these tiles, we also consider their distribution.
- 3:47SPEAKER_02: That means, let's say we sample some data from forests.
- 3:50SPEAKER_02: We also have some tiles from deserts, rainforests.
- 3:54SPEAKER_02: So we don't want to make it as rich as possible that we can do.
- 3:58SPEAKER_00: And does that...
- 4:02SPEAKER_00: involve a lot of work just choosing those locations,
- 4:04SPEAKER_00: or is it kind of a straightforward query and you're happy?
- 4:08SPEAKER_02: I would say it's kind of straightforward.
- 4:10SPEAKER_02: So basically what we do is we select randomly,
- 4:13but also one thing that we have to keep in mind is that we need
- 4:17to avoid choosing
- 4:18SPEAKER_02: some tiles that has overlaps with our validation data.
- 4:22SPEAKER_02: So for instance, we have a crop data set in our validation pipeline,
- 4:27SPEAKER_02: So when choosing the training data,
- 4:29SPEAKER_02: we have to exclude the tiles that falls into that region of interest.
- 4:35SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
- 4:35SPEAKER_00: So the validation is influencing the data that's used to train a model.
- 4:41SPEAKER_02: Yes.
- 4:42SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
- 4:43And it's worth pointing out,
- 4:44so we got Tessera is unusual when it comes to model training.
- 4:48Usually the hard part is training the model and then inference
- 4:52is relatively simple
- 4:53SPEAKER_01: and cheap,
- 4:54SPEAKER_01: relatively.
- 4:56SPEAKER_01: In Tessera's case, it's the other way around.
- 4:58So training the model still requires a fair bit of work and
- 5:02data movement,
- 5:02SPEAKER_01: but actually inference is where it gets really expensive.
- 5:05Because we then have to have all of the data we need in order
- 5:08to produce those
- 5:09SPEAKER_01: embeddings for all of those years across both those modalities.
- 5:13SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 5:14What is the data requirement for a single embedding given it's
- 5:17a whole year and
- 5:17SPEAKER_00: it's two modalities?
- 5:21SPEAKER_02: That's probably a franc.
- 5:24SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you mean like the number of observations in the year?
- 5:27Yeah,
- 5:27I'm just trying to get a sense for you say it's,
- 5:29you know,
- 5:29costly data wise.
- 5:31SPEAKER_00: I'm just trying to get a sense for that.
- 5:33So usually,
- 5:34I think on average,
- 5:37we have 76 Sentinel-2 observations across the globe.
- 5:42SPEAKER_02: And I think for Sentinel-1,
- 5:43SPEAKER_02: I think we have more data in Europe,
- 5:46SPEAKER_02: but also maybe less data in Africa.
- 5:49But so,
- 5:49yeah,
- 5:50I would say probably for Sentinel-2,
- 5:51we have 76 observations.
- 5:53SPEAKER_02: And for Sentinel-1, we have probably 16 observations.
- 5:57SPEAKER_02: So that is actually quite a lot of data when producing the embeddings.
- 6:01SPEAKER_00: So approximately 120, 130 images get compressed down to a small vector.
- 6:08SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
- 6:09SPEAKER_00: And it requires,
- 6:10SPEAKER_01: I think we worked out it was about 180,000 GPU hours for the eight,
- 6:16SPEAKER_01: seven years of embeddings across those seven years.
- 6:22SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 6:23SPEAKER_00: So in practice, you're not expecting everyone to compute the embeddings.
- 6:25SPEAKER_00: You've just done it and distributed them.
- 6:28SPEAKER_00: Correct.
- 6:28SPEAKER_00: Very cool.
- 6:30And what decisions did you have to make when you chose your
- 6:32training strategies?
- 6:37Well,
- 6:38actually,
- 6:38I think in terms of training,
- 6:41of course,
- 6:41the Tessera is a pixel-based model.
- 6:43SPEAKER_02: So it's quite different from any other foundation models,
- 6:45SPEAKER_02: which I know most of the foundation models,
- 6:47SPEAKER_02: they're patch-based.
- 6:48So I think in terms of training strategy,
- 6:50we adopt several different ways to train the model.
- 6:56So first of all,
- 6:56what we do is,
- 6:57since if we only select all the pixels within the patch,
- 7:01SPEAKER_02: then it means that basically most of the pixels, they look the same.
- 7:04SPEAKER_02: They look very similar within the patch.
- 7:06So what we do during the training is that we actually gather as
- 7:09many pixels as
- 7:10SPEAKER_02: possible within the globe,
- 7:14SPEAKER_02: and then we just randomly sample them.
- 7:17SPEAKER_02: Basically, we just scramble them.
- 7:18SPEAKER_02: This makes sure that the loss converges smoothly,
- 7:23SPEAKER_02: and also this prevents from the feature collapse.
- 7:26SPEAKER_02: And also, there are some other stuff that we do.
- 7:28SPEAKER_02: So first, we have a lot of GPUs, of course.
- 7:32SPEAKER_02: So we set up a very large batch size.
- 7:35SPEAKER_02: I think it's over 32,000 in terms of batch size.
- 7:39SPEAKER_02: And also, there are some other tricks that we do in terms of optimizer.
- 7:43SPEAKER_02: And also, we're doing this.
- 7:47SPEAKER_02: learning rate warm up and then cosine annealing stuff.
- 7:50SPEAKER_02: So yeah, so there's a lot of tricks that we do for the training.
- 7:54SPEAKER_02: And yes, everyone can find the training details in our paper as well.
- 7:57I'm really curious because you mentioned it's pixel based and
- 8:00obviously there's
- 8:00SPEAKER_00: other models where they're image based and you do this kind of masked
- 8:04SPEAKER_00: reconstruction.
- 8:04SPEAKER_00: How does it differ for pixel based then?
- 8:07Yeah,
- 8:08so we adopt a different way when it comes to self-supervised
- 8:12training.
- 8:12SPEAKER_02: So like you said,
- 8:13SPEAKER_02: like you mentioned,
- 8:14a lot of patch-based methods that you actually use mask
- 8:18autoencoder to do the SSL
- 8:21SPEAKER_02: training.
- 8:22SPEAKER_02: But for pixel-based, you can do that.
- 8:24SPEAKER_02: I mean,
- 8:24SPEAKER_02: you can just simply just mask along the temporal dimension,
- 8:28SPEAKER_02: not on the spatial dimension.
- 8:30SPEAKER_02: You can actually mask some of the observations.
- 8:33SPEAKER_02: And then you predict the missing...
- 8:36observation you can do that as well but what we do is quite
- 8:38different so we adopted
- 8:39a method it's called bottle twins so essentially what bulletins
- 8:43does is that we
- 8:44sample two augmentations or actually two subsets of the whole
- 8:49year's observations
- 8:50and then we just want to make sure that although these two
- 8:53subsets are different
- 8:55but we want to reduce the like the reduction within these two
- 8:59subsets by only
- 9:00SPEAKER_02: maintaining the most essential information
- 9:03SPEAKER_02: So this is what we do for the Cesario,
- 9:06SPEAKER_02: like self-supervised training,
- 9:07SPEAKER_02: which is,
- 9:08SPEAKER_02: I think,
- 9:08SPEAKER_02: this is actually the first foundation model that uses bottle twins,
- 9:14SPEAKER_02: uses this reduction,
- 9:16SPEAKER_02: sorry,
- 9:17SPEAKER_02: redundancy reduction method.
- 9:20And the intuition there is that it should reconstruct similar
- 9:26embeddings if it's
- 9:27SPEAKER_00: got the second half versus the first half of the year then.
- 9:31SPEAKER_01: Yeah, something like that.
- 9:33SPEAKER_01: But they're not different parts of the year.
- 9:37They're two sets of observations that span the year,
- 9:40but they might be different.
- 9:42So given two sets of observations at the same point,
- 9:47you want the same representation.
- 9:49SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 9:49SPEAKER_00: The observations being different modalities or...
- 9:52SPEAKER_01: The observations being a subset of the total observations.
- 9:57SPEAKER_01: So we basically take two different samples.
- 9:59SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 10:00So you randomly select some fracture and for set A and the
- 10:03remainder of a set B.
- 10:04Okay.
- 10:05SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 10:05SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 10:06SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
- 10:07And Frank is underselling the amount of architectural work and
- 10:11high parameter
- 10:12SPEAKER_01: optimization stuff.
- 10:13SPEAKER_01: Actually trying to get Barlow Twins to continue to scale is quite tricky.
- 10:18And it requires some of the tricks that we've kind of got in
- 10:21the paper to be able
- 10:23SPEAKER_01: to not have the representation collapse after a while.
- 10:26SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 10:28And those are tricks that you learn along the way or they're
- 10:31kind of standard
- 10:31SPEAKER_00: tricks that people are adopting now?
- 10:35SPEAKER_02: Actually, we adopted some common practices.
- 10:42SPEAKER_02: And also, actually, when training the model along the way.
- 10:45Actually,
- 10:46at first,
- 10:46I almost gave up the model training,
- 10:48because at first,
- 10:48it's really a pain.
- 10:50SPEAKER_02: The loss won't converge, and also the embedding just sucks.
- 10:54SPEAKER_02: It really sucks.
- 10:55SPEAKER_02: But then at some point, we just realize some issues.
- 10:59SPEAKER_02: Then we just dive into that.
- 11:00SPEAKER_02: We just analyze what can be the reason behind that.
- 11:04SPEAKER_02: Then we just fix that, fix that.
- 11:05And after iterating it for several times,
- 11:08then finally the loss converges.
- 11:11SPEAKER_02: And also the embedding gets better.
- 11:12SPEAKER_02: At least from the map, it looks pretty.
- 11:16SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I think we learn a lot along the way.
- 11:20SPEAKER_00: So first sort of iteration phase is get the loss down.
- 11:24I want to circle back to the evaluation approach because I was
- 11:28kind of intrigued
- 11:29SPEAKER_00: that it also influenced the selection of the training data.
- 11:31SPEAKER_00: Can you talk a bit more about that?
- 11:35SPEAKER_02: It's quite simple because when training this AI model,
- 11:38SPEAKER_02: especially when you use the AI model for evaluation,
- 11:42SPEAKER_02: I think one concern is that is there a data leakage?
- 11:47So when training the data,
- 11:48so when training the model,
- 11:49we just want to exclude
- 11:51We just want to make sure that all the data used for evaluation
- 11:55are not in the training set.
- 11:57I think training with Earth data is quite different with
- 12:03training with language
- 12:04SPEAKER_02: model and also other models.
- 12:06SPEAKER_02: Because in remote sensing, basically we have unlimited data, right?
- 12:10SPEAKER_02: We have a lot of satellite images.
- 12:13SPEAKER_02: So I think this is possible.
- 12:15So that's why we just exclude the region of interest that falls
- 12:20into the validation data set.
- 12:22SPEAKER_02: So, yeah.
- 12:23SPEAKER_00: So quite a simple data set design in that sense.
- 12:26SPEAKER_00: I'm just curious,
- 12:27SPEAKER_00: across the different research teams,
- 12:29do they agree on the evaluation tasks and data sets or is that
- 12:34still something
- 12:34SPEAKER_00: that's being figured out?
- 12:37SPEAKER_01: So we had a couple of
- 12:41evaluation tasks or validation tasks that we also had reported
- 12:45during training.
- 12:47And the reason for that is you don't just want your loss to
- 12:49converge and then find
- 12:50out later on in training that actually your loss being low had
- 12:54absolutely nothing
- 12:54SPEAKER_01: to do with the actual performance on downstream tasks.
- 12:58So there were a couple of different tasks that we had in there
- 13:02that we had
- 13:03SPEAKER_01: of the training loop and we could actually see that their performance was
- 13:05increasing as we scaled parameters and scaled data um it's
- 13:09worth pointing out that
- 13:09this is actually like a much larger team uh we have many
- 13:12colleagues all of whom are
- 13:14on the paper um and uh so there was a lot of as we were
- 13:18evaluating the model there
- 13:19was a lot of trying to kind of figure out from colleagues where
- 13:22where else we
- 13:23SPEAKER_01: should look how else we should try and kind of fix it fantastic
- 13:30SPEAKER_00: You've got a couple of tasks that you evaluated on.
- 13:32SPEAKER_00: I know you have some visualizations.
- 13:34SPEAKER_00: Maybe now is a good time to dive into those.
- 13:37SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
- 13:37SPEAKER_01: So I kind of want to just show two.
- 13:39SPEAKER_01: It says sharing is not turned on.
- 13:41SPEAKER_00: Oh, God.
- 13:42SPEAKER_00: They changed Zoom.
- 13:44SPEAKER_00: And here we go.
- 13:45SPEAKER_00: It should be working now.
- 13:47SPEAKER_00: Allow you to present.
- 13:52SPEAKER_00: We've lost your audio, though.
- 13:54SPEAKER_00: You've muted yourself.
- 13:55SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 14:01SPEAKER_02: Sorry, Sadik, we can't hear you.
- 14:03SPEAKER_01: No, no, it's fine.
- 14:04SPEAKER_01: It's fine.
- 14:04SPEAKER_01: I can't use Zoom.
- 14:05SPEAKER_01: Okay.
- 14:06SPEAKER_01: So I want to just show two downstream tasks.
- 14:09SPEAKER_01: So like I said,
- 14:10there's a big team around Tessera and we work with a lot of
- 14:14ecologists and plant
- 14:15SPEAKER_01: scientists and now conservationists.
- 14:18And many people are using Tessera to do downstream tasks where
- 14:24it's dramatically
- 14:24speeding up their ability to use remote sensing data to kind of
- 14:28answer vital
- 14:29SPEAKER_01: questions in ecology and conservation.
- 14:32SPEAKER_01: But this is just one example here of our colleague Yovina.
- 14:37She took two sets,
- 14:41two areas where there have been wildfires in California.
- 14:45SPEAKER_01: And she took samples from those areas and then did a UMAP,
- 14:53SPEAKER_01: so unsupervised dimension anti-reduction.
- 14:56SPEAKER_01: So from 128 dimensions down to two dimensions.
- 15:00SPEAKER_01: This is purely unsupervised.
- 15:01SPEAKER_01: There's no use of labels.
- 15:03But then what she did is she then colored it based on whether
- 15:06there was a fire and
- 15:08SPEAKER_01: then when the fire happened and how severe it was.
- 15:11And you can see that kind of there is clear separation here for
- 15:17where there was a
- 15:17SPEAKER_01: fire and what time of year it happened and how severe it was.
- 15:21So kind of that Tesla representation has already learned those
- 15:26features and it's there.
- 15:28SPEAKER_01: And so obviously,
- 15:30SPEAKER_01: if you have that kind of separation,
- 15:32SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 15:32SPEAKER_01: a model kind of built on this is going to perform quite well.
- 15:36SPEAKER_00: It's interesting that the two fires are on different clusters as well.
- 15:39SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
- 15:40SPEAKER_01: So that temporal information,
- 15:41SPEAKER_01: despite the fact that you're only got one representation for the year,
- 15:44there is temporal information in there as to when things happen
- 15:47during the year.
- 15:48And we're still trying to understand just how much and how
- 15:51precise it is.
- 15:53And just to give you another example,
- 15:55this is an example from our colleague,
- 15:58Madeleine Esaes.
- 16:00She did something very similar in Senegal where she took a
- 16:04bunch of points in
- 16:04Senegal and then she did a two dimensional unsupervised
- 16:11dimensional anti-reduction.
- 16:13And then use the land cover ground truce from the agricultural
- 16:18monitoring JECAM project.
- 16:21SPEAKER_01: And again,
- 16:21you can see this separation showing you that the land cover
- 16:25kind of very nicely
- 16:26SPEAKER_01: separates out in these different areas.
- 16:28And that's another good example of where you would then expect
- 16:31the kind of a
- 16:33SPEAKER_01: downstream map produced from this to be a very high quality.
- 16:37SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
- 16:39It almost looks like these embeddings have solved the annual
- 16:43tasks at this point.
- 16:46SPEAKER_00: Is that controversial?
- 16:49SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
- 16:51SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's still more to go.
- 16:52SPEAKER_01: We know with, I'm just going to stop showing this for a second.
- 16:57SPEAKER_01: We know,
- 16:58and the paper has a bunch of these scaling work that we've done
- 17:02to show that as we
- 17:03SPEAKER_01: add more data and add more parameters,
- 17:05the embeddings get better and our performance on downstream
- 17:08tasks improves.
- 17:10SPEAKER_01: So maybe, but this is also as bad as they're going to get.
- 17:15SPEAKER_01: They will only get better from here.
- 17:17SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 17:18SPEAKER_00: And so what do you see the immediate impact being of this new capability?
- 17:23So we have colleagues in ecology where they've had projects
- 17:28that would normally
- 17:28SPEAKER_01: have been kind of 18 months with a postdoc.
- 17:31And we've had some master's students over the summer produce
- 17:34maps in a week or two.
- 17:36SPEAKER_01: Because instead of having to spend time with,
- 17:38SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 17:39SPEAKER_01: dealing with clouds and dealing with,
- 17:40SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 17:41SPEAKER_01: the gaps in observations or missing observations,
- 17:43SPEAKER_01: that kind of thing,
- 17:44SPEAKER_01: it's very easy to take Tessera for a year and even put a very,
- 17:47SPEAKER_01: very simple model on top of it.
- 17:50So increasing the velocity,
- 17:51reducing the barriers to the use of the remote sensing data.
- 17:56SPEAKER_01: Yes,
- 17:57while also making sure that people are not completely reliant
- 18:00on us in that the
- 18:01SPEAKER_01: model is open source,
- 18:02SPEAKER_01: the weights are open source,
- 18:04SPEAKER_01: the embeddings under a Creative Commons batch,
- 18:05SPEAKER_01: we should license.
- 18:06SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you don't have to rely on us to use it.
- 18:10SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 18:12And so I guess in that context,
- 18:14you know,
- 18:14you'd be able to get to a certain point faster.
- 18:16Do you think most people or will it be task by task would be
- 18:20using just the
- 18:21SPEAKER_00: embeddings or do you think the embeddings are a stepping stone?
- 18:26The advice I've been giving to people is that Tessera should be
- 18:28your baseline.
- 18:29If you've got a remote sensing task that you always do,
- 18:32try it with Tessera.
- 18:34SPEAKER_01: You may find that actually the performance is exactly what you want.
- 18:38SPEAKER_01: And certainly in many of the tasks,
- 18:41SPEAKER_01: my ecologist colleagues and plant scientists,
- 18:43SPEAKER_01: it is more than sufficient for what they want.
- 18:46It has another property which surprised us,
- 18:49which is incredibly label efficient.
- 18:51SPEAKER_01: So because you are fitting a model model
- 18:54only to the 128 dimension embeddings and you're not trying to
- 18:58learn those physical
- 19:00features of the raw observations you're not spending those
- 19:03precious labels fitting
- 19:04SPEAKER_01: parameters that are actually more about the data distribution of the raw
- 19:08observations and so actually you end up with needing a tiny
- 19:11fraction of the labels
- 19:13SPEAKER_01: So where you've got a problem that is very label scarce,
- 19:16SPEAKER_01: and maybe you've tried remote sensing raw data in the past,
- 19:20SPEAKER_01: it's very much worth trying with Tessera again,
- 19:23SPEAKER_01: and you may be surprised in the performance.
- 19:27SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
- 19:27SPEAKER_00: That's a really good summary there.
- 19:29I just want to close up by saying what's next on the research
- 19:34dimension then.
- 19:35SPEAKER_00: It sounds like scaling is one possible avenue of the ones.
- 19:41SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
- 19:41SPEAKER_01: so once you've got this kind of compact representation,
- 19:44SPEAKER_01: there are things you can do with it,
- 19:46SPEAKER_01: like change detection.
- 19:47You can look at the embeddings year to year and try and
- 19:50understand has something
- 19:51SPEAKER_01: changed and what.
- 19:54And the idea is that because you've abstracted away a lot of
- 19:57those things like
- 19:58SPEAKER_01: clouds and temporal gaps and that kind of thing.
- 20:01SPEAKER_01: I mean,
- 20:01SPEAKER_01: the seasonality,
- 20:03SPEAKER_01: you're able to get a much more precise answer to yes,
- 20:05SPEAKER_01: something has changed in a way that doesn't get fooled by those.
- 20:09SPEAKER_01: So we've got colleagues looking at using test for change detection.
- 20:13SPEAKER_01: And there's also things like forecasting,
- 20:15SPEAKER_01: because,
- 20:16SPEAKER_01: again,
- 20:16SPEAKER_01: you've now got this nice kind of latent space that you could forecast in,
- 20:20SPEAKER_01: as opposed to the forecasting,
- 20:23SPEAKER_01: the raw observations themselves,
- 20:24which mean you have to model things like clouds and temporal
- 20:27gaps and speckle and
- 20:28SPEAKER_01: those kind of things.
- 20:30SPEAKER_01: So those are kind of new areas beyond just scaling the existing model.
- 20:36SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 20:38SPEAKER_00: And also modalities,
- 20:40SPEAKER_00: the different modalities,
- 20:41SPEAKER_00: are they going to be a part of future models,
- 20:44SPEAKER_00: you think?
- 20:46SPEAKER_02: Yes, this is actually something we've been trying to do.
- 20:49SPEAKER_02: So I think like change detection.
- 20:51SPEAKER_02: Sudeikis is very into change detection,
- 20:53while one of my major tasks right now is to develop like
- 20:57Tessera version 2.
- 20:59SPEAKER_02: So maybe in version 2.
- 21:00SPEAKER_02: It's not maybe, actually it is.
- 21:02SPEAKER_02: So in version 2.
- 21:03So we're going to have then set into the Tessera embedding,
- 21:07into the Tessera model.
- 21:08SPEAKER_02: So there will be sensor one, sensor two, and Landsat.
- 21:11And also what's more fascinating about Landsat is that we have
- 21:14data for Landsat.
- 21:16SPEAKER_02: We have data since 1970s.
- 21:18SPEAKER_02: So let's say, think about that.
- 21:20SPEAKER_02: Once we have Landsat into our model,
- 21:22SPEAKER_02: then it is possible that we can generate embeddings from 1970s onwards.
- 21:28So that will give you actually a very long time series of
- 21:31embedding that also open
- 21:33SPEAKER_02: the doors for all the other tasks.
- 21:36especially I think it's for ecological applications and also
- 21:42for forest monitoring.
- 21:44SPEAKER_02: So yes, this is something I've been doing and also I've been testing.
- 21:49SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much for sharing that.
- 21:50SPEAKER_01: There's also alternative SAR data sources we're looking at,
- 21:56SPEAKER_01: which will then increase the temporal resolution.
- 21:58SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 21:59SPEAKER_00: And so that's not Sentinel-1, that's something else.
- 22:02Yeah,
- 22:03so we're looking at Pulsar 2 as a possible data source as well
- 22:06going in.
- 22:07SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 22:08SPEAKER_00: Very exciting.
- 22:09SPEAKER_00: Lots of developments happening.
- 22:12SPEAKER_00: You've got the paper that's published already.
- 22:15SPEAKER_01: That is on archive and it's under peer review at the moment.
- 22:19SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
- 22:20SPEAKER_00: So it should be out pretty soon.
- 22:22SPEAKER_00: I'll put the links in the show notes.
- 22:23Lastly,
- 22:24if people want to follow along with the project,
- 22:27where should they be watching?
- 22:29So you can look at our GitHub,
- 22:30the GeoTessera project under the uCameo GitHub project.
- 22:37That has the library,
- 22:38GeoTessera,
- 22:39which should make working with Tessera projects.
- 22:42much simpler if you're in the python world and there's bindings
- 22:45coming from other
- 22:46languages as well um there's other projects going at the moment
- 22:49um with some of our
- 22:50uh some we've been helped by a lot of organizations amd intel
- 22:54the university's own
- 22:55computing resource um and uh hopefully there should be now uh
- 22:59the ability to get
- 22:59SPEAKER_01: the embeddings on s3 soon via aws's open data program okay
- 23:06So a few different places,
- 23:07GitHub,
- 23:07probably the main one for developers,
- 23:09et cetera.
- 23:10SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
- 23:11SPEAKER_00: I'll put all that in the show notes.
- 23:13SPEAKER_00: Once again, thanks for coming and sharing all this information.
- 23:15SPEAKER_00: Really exciting model, really exciting developments in this space.
- 23:19SPEAKER_00: And I can't wait to see what comes for version two.
- 23:22SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Robin.
- 23:23SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Robbie.
- 23:24SPEAKER_00: See ya.