A Strategy Optimized Pix2pix Approach for SAR-to-Optical Image Translation Task

This technical report summarizes the analysis and approach on the image-to-image translation task in the Multimodal Learning for Earth and Environment Challenge (MultiEarth 2022). In terms of strategy optimization, cloud classification is utilized to filter optical images with dense cloud coverage to aid the supervised learning alike approach. The commonly used pix2pix framework with a few optimizations is applied to build the model. A weighted combination of mean squared error and mean absolute error is incorporated in the loss function. As for evaluation, peak to signal ratio and structural similarity were both considered in our preliminary analysis. Lastly, our method achieved the second place with a final error score of 0.0412. The results indicate great potential towards SAR-to-optical translation in remote sensing tasks, specifically for the support of long-term environmental monitoring and protection.

Time Gated Convolutional Neural Networks for Crop Classification

This paper presented a state-of-the-art framework, Time Gated Convolutional Neural Network (TGCNN) that takes advantage of temporal information and gating mechanisms for the crop classification problem. Besides, several vegetation indices were constructed to expand dimensions of input data to take advantage of spectral information. Both spatial (channel-wise) and temporal (step-wise) correlation are considered in TGCNN. Specifically, our preliminary analysis indicates that step-wise information is of greater importance in this data set. Lastly, the gating mechanism helps capture high-order relationship. Our TGCNN solution achieves $0.973$ F1 score, $0.977$ AUC ROC and $0.948$ IoU, respectively. In addition, it outperforms three other benchmarks in different local tasks (Kenya, Brazil and Togo). Overall, our experiments demonstrate that TGCNN is advantageous in this earth observation time series classification task.