Lossy Neural Compression for Geospatial Analytics: A Review

Over the past decades, there has been an explosion in the amount of available Earth Observation (EO) data. The unprecedented coverage of the Earth's surface and atmosphere by satellite imagery has resulted in large volumes of data that must be transmitted to ground stations, stored in data centers, and distributed to end users. Modern Earth System Models (ESMs) face similar challenges, operating at high spatial and temporal resolutions, producing petabytes of data per simulated day. Data compression has gained relevance over the past decade, with neural compression (NC) emerging from deep learning and information theory, making EO data and ESM outputs ideal candidates due to their abundance of unlabeled data. In this review, we outline recent developments in NC applied to geospatial data. We introduce the fundamental concepts of NC including seminal works in its traditional applications to image and video compression domains with focus on lossy compression. We discuss the unique characteristics of EO and ESM data, contrasting them with "natural images", and explain the additional challenges and opportunities they present. Moreover, we review current applications of NC across various EO modalities and explore the limited efforts in ESM compression to date. The advent of self-supervised learning (SSL) and foundation models (FM) has advanced methods to efficiently distill representations from vast unlabeled data. We connect these developments to NC for EO, highlighting the similarities between the two fields and elaborate on the potential of transferring compressed feature representations for machine--to--machine communication. Based on insights drawn from this review, we devise future directions relevant to applications in EO and ESM.

Scalable 3D Panoptic Segmentation With Superpoint Graph Clustering

We introduce a highly efficient method for panoptic segmentation of large 3D point clouds by redefining this task as a scalable graph clustering problem. This approach can be trained using only local auxiliary tasks, thereby eliminating the resource-intensive instance-matching step during training. Moreover, our formulation can easily be adapted to the superpoint paradigm, further increasing its efficiency. This allows our model to process scenes with millions of points and thousands of objects in a single inference. Our method, called SuperCluster, achieves a new state-of-the-art panoptic segmentation performance for two indoor scanning datasets: $50.1$ PQ ($+7.8$) for S3DIS Area~5, and $58.7$ PQ ($+25.2$) for ScanNetV2. We also set the first state-of-the-art for two large-scale mobile mapping benchmarks: KITTI-360 and DALES. With only $209$k parameters, our model is over $30$ times smaller than the best-competing method and trains up to $15$ times faster. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/drprojects/superpoint_transformer.

Efficient 3D Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Transformer

We introduce a novel superpoint-based transformer architecture for efficient semantic segmentation of large-scale 3D scenes. Our method incorporates a fast algorithm to partition point clouds into a hierarchical superpoint structure, which makes our preprocessing 7 times times faster than existing superpoint-based approaches. Additionally, we leverage a self-attention mechanism to capture the relationships between superpoints at multiple scales, leading to state-of-the-art performance on three challenging benchmark datasets: S3DIS (76.0% mIoU 6-fold validation), KITTI-360 (63.5% on Val), and DALES (79.6%). With only 212k parameters, our approach is up to 200 times more compact than other state-of-the-art models while maintaining similar performance. Furthermore, our model can be trained on a single GPU in 3 hours for a fold of the S3DIS dataset, which is 7x to 70x fewer GPU-hours than the best-performing methods. Our code and models are accessible at github.com/drprojects/superpoint_transformer.

Learning Multi-View Aggregation In the Wild for Large-Scale 3D Semantic Segmentation

Recent works on 3D semantic segmentation propose to exploit the synergy between images and point clouds by processing each modality with a dedicated network and projecting learned 2D features onto 3D points. Merging large-scale point clouds and images raises several challenges, such as constructing a mapping between points and pixels, and aggregating features between multiple views. Current methods require mesh reconstruction or specialized sensors to recover occlusions, and use heuristics to select and aggregate available images. In contrast, we propose an end-to-end trainable multi-view aggregation model leveraging the viewing conditions of 3D points to merge features from images taken at arbitrary positions. Our method can combine standard 2D and 3D networks and outperforms both 3D models operating on colorized point clouds and hybrid 2D/3D networks without requiring colorization, meshing, or true depth maps. We set a new state-of-the-art for large-scale indoor/outdoor semantic segmentation on S3DIS (74.7 mIoU 6-Fold) and on KITTI-360 (58.3 mIoU). Our full pipeline is accessible at https://github.com/drprojects/DeepViewAgg, and only requires raw 3D scans and a set of images and poses.