How did I end up in this position though?

I am not an expert in satellite imagery, in fact, it’s quite the contrary actually!

Recently, I was accepted into a program hosted by Omdena, a collaborative global platform that pairs AI learning with solving social problems. I joined one of their AI Challenges in collaboration with the United Nations World Food Program. The challenge goal is to fight hunger by locating, tracking, and improving the growth of crops of staple foods such as rice and wheat in Nepal.

But what truly makes this collaboration a special and remarkable one is that people from all parts of the world with varying levels of technical expertise are chosen to participate in it.

The Problem Itself

In order to accurately locate crop fields from satellite imagery, it is conceivable that images of a certain quality are required. Although Deep Learning is notoriously known for being able to pull off miracles, we human beings will have a real field day labeling the data if we cannot clearly make out the details within an image.

The following is an example of what we would like to achieve.

Semantic Segmentation Example https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2017.00017/full

If we can clearly identify areas within a satellite image that correspond to a particular crop, we can easily extend our work to evaluate the area of cultivation of each crop, which will go a long way in ensuring food security.

Let’s get started

To get our hands on the required data, we explored a myriad of sources of satellite imagery. We ultimately settled on using images from Sentinel-2, largely due to the fact that the satellite mission boasts images of the best quality amongst other open-source images.

Is the best good enough?

Original Image

Despite my previous assertion that I am not an expert in satellite imagery, I believe that having seen the above image we can all agree that the quality of it is not quite up to scratch.

A real nightmare to label!

It is completely unfeasible to discern the demarcations between individual crop fields.

Of course, this isn’t completely unreasonable for open-source data. Satellite image vendors have to be especially careful when it comes to the distribution of such data due to privacy concerns.

How outrageous it would be if simply anyone can look up what our backyards look like on the Internet, right?

However, this inconvenience comes at a great detriment to our project. In order to clearly identify and label crops in an image that are relevant to us, we would require images of much higher quality than what we have.

Are we screwed now?

Photo by Thomas Stephan on Unsplash

Nope. Super-resolution to the rescue!

Deep Learning practitioners love to apply what they know to solve the problems they face. You probably know where I am getting with this. If the quality of an image isn’t good enough, we try to enhance it of course! The process we like to call super-resolution.

Deep Image Prior¹

This is one of the first things that we tried, and here are the results.

Results of applying Deep Image Prior to the original image.

Quite noticeably there has been some improvement, the model has done an amazing job of smoothening out the rough edges in the photo. The pixelation problem has been pretty much-taken care of and everything blends in well.

However, in doing so the model has neglected finer details and that leads to an image that feels out of focus. Next try!

Decrappify²

Naturally, we wouldn’t stop until we got something completely satisfactory, which led us to try this instead.

Results of applying Decrappify to the original image

What happened?

Now, it is quite obvious that this model has done something completely different than Deep Image Prior. Instead of attempting to ensure that the pixels blend in with each other, this model instead places great emphasis on refining each individual pixel. In doing so it neglects to consider how each pixel is actually related to its surrounding pixels.

Albeit being successful in injecting some life into the original image by making the colors more refined and attractive, the pixelation in the image remains an issue.

Brilliance or stupidity? You be the judge

Just as we were about to throw in the towel for the night, I came up with an idea that seemed incredibly silly at that time. But before I tell you what I did, let’s take a look at the results!

Results of running the original image through Deep Image Prior and then Decrappify – Source: Omdena

When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. We have come such a long way from our original image! And to think that the approach taken to achieve such results was such a silly one.

Since each of the previous two models was no good individually, but they clearly were good at getting different things done, what if we combined the two of them?

So we ran the original image through Deep Image Prior, and subsequently fed the results of that through the Decrappify model, and voila!

Relative to the original image, the colors of the current image look incredibly realistic. The lucid demarcations of the crop fields will certainly come a long way in helping us label our data.

Our Methodology

The way we pulled this off was embarrassingly simple. We used Deep Image Prior which is found at its official Github repository. As for Decrappify, given our objectives, we figured that training it on satellite images would definitely help out. Having the two models readily set up, it’s just a matter of feeding images into them one after the other.

A Quick Look at the Models

For those of you that have made it this far and are curious about what the models actually are, here’s a brief overview of them.

Deep Image Prior

This method hardly conforms to conventional deep learning-based super-resolution approaches.

Typically, we would create a dataset of low and high-resolution image pairs, following which we train a model to map a low-resolution image to its high-resolution counterpart. However, this particular model does none of the above, and as a result, does not have to be pre-trained prior to inference time. Instead, a randomly initialized deep neural network is trained on one particular image. That image could be of one of your favorite sports star, a picture of your pet, a painting that you like, or even random noise. Its task is then, to optimize its parameters to map the input image to the image that we are trying to super-resolve. In other words, we are training our network to overfit our low-resolution image.

Why does this make sense?

It turns out that the structure of deep networks imposes a ‘naturalness prior’ over the generated image. Quite simply, this means that when overfitting/memorizing an image, deep networks prefer to learn the natural/smoother concepts first before moving on to the unnatural ones. That is to say that the convolutional neural network (CNN) will first ‘identify’ the colors that form shapes in various parts of the image and then proceed to materialize various textures in the image. As the optimization process goes on, the CNN will latch on to finer details.

When generating an image, neural networks prefer natural-looking images as opposed to pixelated ones. Thus, we start the optimization process and allow it to continue to the point where it has captured most of the relevant details but has not learned any of the pixelations and noise. For super-resolution, we train it to a point such that the resulting image it creates closely resembles the original image when they are both downsampled. There exist multiple high-resolution images that could have produced each low-resolution image.

And as it turns out, the most plausible image is also the one that doesn’t appear to be highly pixelated, this is because the structure of deep networks imposes a ‘naturalness prior’ on generated images.

We highly recommend this talk by Dmitry Ulyanov (who was the main author of the Deep Image Prior paper) to understand the above concepts in depth.

Decrappify

In contrast with the previous model, here it is about learning as much possible about satellite images. As a result, when we give it a low-quality image as an input, the model is able to bridge the gap between a low and high-quality version of it by using its knowledge of the world to fill in the blanks.

The model has a U-net architecture with a pre-trained ResNet backbone. But the part that is really interesting is in the loss function, which has been adapted from this paper. The objective of this model is to produce an output image of higher quality, such that when it is fed through a pre-trained VGG16 model, it produces minimal ‘style’ and ‘content’ loss relative to the ground truth image. The ‘style’ loss is relevant because we want the model to be able to be careful in creating a high-resolution image with a texture that is realistic of a satellite image. The ‘content’ loss is responsible for encouraging the model to recreate intricate details in its higher quality output.

If I have managed to pique your curiosity, do check out the original articles/papers (see below) for more details.

Closing Words

It was a real thrill ride, and I am really glad that we managed to get reasonably good results! Aside from that, I’m really elated to be able to apply the stuff I have learned to problems that really matter in the world. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the help of my incredibly supportive team.

Lastly, the next time I think of a silly idea I will never be too quick to discount it. Although our gut instincts will occasionally give us crazy ideas, we will never know how it ends if we do not give it a chance.

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This article is written by James Tan, Saqib Shamsi.

Ready to test your skills?

If you’re interested in collaborating, apply to join an Omdena project at: https://www.omdena.com/projects