Beyond Grid Data: Exploring Graph Neural Networks for Earth Observation

Earth Observation (EO) data analysis has been significantly revolutionized by deep learning (DL), with applications typically limited to grid-like data structures. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) emerge as an important innovation, propelling DL into the non-Euclidean domain. Naturally, GNNs can effectively tackle the challenges posed by diverse modalities, multiple sensors, and the heterogeneous nature of EO data. To introduce GNNs in the related domains, our review begins by offering fundamental knowledge on GNNs. Then, we summarize the generic problems in EO, to which GNNs can offer potential solutions. Following this, we explore a broad spectrum of GNNs' applications to scientific problems in Earth systems, covering areas such as weather and climate analysis, disaster management, air quality monitoring, agriculture, land cover classification, hydrological process modeling, and urban modeling. The rationale behind adopting GNNs in these fields is explained, alongside methodologies for organizing graphs and designing favorable architectures for various tasks. Furthermore, we highlight methodological challenges of implementing GNNs in these domains and possible solutions that could guide future research. While acknowledging that GNNs are not a universal solution, we conclude the paper by comparing them with other popular architectures like transformers and analyzing their potential synergies.

Physics-embedded Fourier Neural Network for Partial Differential Equations

We consider solving complex spatiotemporal dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) using frequency domain-based discrete learning approaches, such as Fourier neural operators. Despite their widespread use for approximating nonlinear PDEs, the majority of these methods neglect fundamental physical laws and lack interpretability. We address these shortcomings by introducing Physics-embedded Fourier Neural Networks (PeFNN) with flexible and explainable error control. PeFNN is designed to enforce momentum conservation and yields interpretable nonlinear expressions by utilizing unique multi-scale momentum-conserving Fourier (MC-Fourier) layers and an element-wise product operation. The MC-Fourier layer is by design translation- and rotation-invariant in the frequency domain, serving as a plug-and-play module that adheres to the laws of momentum conservation. PeFNN establishes a new state-of-the-art in solving widely employed spatiotemporal PDEs and generalizes well across input resolutions. Further, we demonstrate its outstanding performance for challenging real-world applications such as large-scale flood simulations.

On the Foundations of Earth and Climate Foundation Models

Foundation models have enormous potential in advancing Earth and climate sciences, however, current approaches may not be optimal as they focus on a few basic features of a desirable Earth and climate foundation model. Crafting the ideal Earth foundation model, we define eleven features which would allow such a foundation model to be beneficial for any geoscientific downstream application in an environmental- and human-centric manner.We further shed light on the way forward to achieve the ideal model and to evaluate Earth foundation models. What comes after foundation models? Energy efficient adaptation, adversarial defenses, and interpretability are among the emerging directions.

Global OpenBuildingMap -- Unveiling the Mystery of Global Buildings

Understanding how buildings are distributed globally is crucial to revealing the human footprint on our home planet. This built environment affects local climate, land surface albedo, resource distribution, and many other key factors that influence well-being and human health. Despite this, quantitative and comprehensive data on the distribution and properties of buildings worldwide is lacking. To this end, by using a big data analytics approach and nearly 800,000 satellite images, we generated the highest resolution and highest accuracy building map ever created: the Global OpenBuildingMap (Global OBM). A joint analysis of building maps and solar potentials indicates that rooftop solar energy can supply the global energy consumption need at a reasonable cost. Specifically, if solar panels were placed on the roofs of all buildings, they could supply 1.1-3.3 times -- depending on the efficiency of the solar device -- the global energy consumption in 2020, which is the year with the highest consumption on record. We also identified a clear geospatial correlation between building areas and key socioeconomic variables, which indicates our global building map can serve as an important input to modeling global socioeconomic needs and drivers.

Large-scale flood modeling and forecasting with FloodCast

Large-scale hydrodynamic models generally rely on fixed-resolution spatial grids and model parameters as well as incurring a high computational cost. This limits their ability to accurately forecast flood crests and issue time-critical hazard warnings. In this work, we build a fast, stable, accurate, resolution-invariant, and geometry-adaptative flood modeling and forecasting framework that can perform at large scales, namely FloodCast. The framework comprises two main modules: multi-satellite observation and hydrodynamic modeling. In the multi-satellite observation module, a real-time unsupervised change detection method and a rainfall processing and analysis tool are proposed to harness the full potential of multi-satellite observations in large-scale flood prediction. In the hydrodynamic modeling module, a geometry-adaptive physics-informed neural solver (GeoPINS) is introduced, benefiting from the absence of a requirement for training data in physics-informed neural networks and featuring a fast, accurate, and resolution-invariant architecture with Fourier neural operators. GeoPINS demonstrates impressive performance on popular PDEs across regular and irregular domains. Building upon GeoPINS, we propose a sequence-to-sequence GeoPINS model to handle long-term temporal series and extensive spatial domains in large-scale flood modeling. Next, we establish a benchmark dataset in the 2022 Pakistan flood to assess various flood prediction methods. Finally, we validate the model in three dimensions - flood inundation range, depth, and transferability of spatiotemporal downscaling. Traditional hydrodynamics and sequence-to-sequence GeoPINS exhibit exceptional agreement during high water levels, while comparative assessments with SAR-based flood depth data show that sequence-to-sequence GeoPINS outperforms traditional hydrodynamics, with smaller prediction errors.

Physics-aware Machine Learning Revolutionizes Scientific Paradigm for Machine Learning and Process-based Hydrology

Accurate hydrological understanding and water cycle prediction are crucial for addressing scientific and societal challenges associated with the management of water resources, particularly under the dynamic influence of anthropogenic climate change. Existing reviews predominantly concentrate on the development of machine learning (ML) in this field, yet there is a clear distinction between hydrology and ML as separate paradigms. Here, we introduce physics-aware ML as a transformative approach to overcome the perceived barrier and revolutionize both fields. Specifically, we present a comprehensive review of the physics-aware ML methods, building a structured community (PaML) of existing methodologies that integrate prior physical knowledge or physics-based modeling into ML. We systematically analyze these PaML methodologies with respect to four aspects: physical data-guided ML, physics-informed ML, physics-embedded ML, and physics-aware hybrid learning. PaML facilitates ML-aided hypotheses, accelerating insights from big data and fostering scientific discoveries. We first conduct a systematic review of hydrology in PaML, including rainfall-runoff hydrological processes and hydrodynamic processes, and highlight the most promising and challenging directions for different objectives and PaML methods. Finally, a new PaML-based hydrology platform, termed HydroPML, is released as a foundation for hydrological applications. HydroPML enhances the explainability and causality of ML and lays the groundwork for the digital water cycle's realization. The HydroPML platform is publicly available at https://hydropml.github.io/.

HyperLISTA-ABT: An Ultra-light Unfolded Network for Accurate Multi-component Differential Tomographic SAR Inversion

Deep neural networks based on unrolled iterative algorithms have achieved remarkable success in sparse reconstruction applications, such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomographic inversion (TomoSAR). However, the currently available deep learning-based TomoSAR algorithms are limited to three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction. The extension of deep learning-based algorithms to four-dimensional (4D) imaging, i.e., differential TomoSAR (D-TomoSAR) applications, is impeded mainly due to the high-dimensional weight matrices required by the network designed for D-TomoSAR inversion, which typically contain millions of freely trainable parameters. Learning such huge number of weights requires an enormous number of training samples, resulting in a large memory burden and excessive time consumption. To tackle this issue, we propose an efficient and accurate algorithm called HyperLISTA-ABT. The weights in HyperLISTA-ABT are determined in an analytical way according to a minimum coherence criterion, trimming the model down to an ultra-light one with only three hyperparameters. Additionally, HyperLISTA-ABT improves the global thresholding by utilizing an adaptive blockwise thresholding scheme, which applies block-coordinate techniques and conducts thresholding in local blocks, so that weak expressions and local features can be retained in the shrinkage step layer by layer. Simulations were performed and demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach, showing that HyperLISTA-ABT achieves superior computational efficiency and with no significant performance degradation compared to state-of-the-art methods. Real data experiments showed that a high-quality 4D point cloud could be reconstructed over a large area by the proposed HyperLISTA-ABT with affordable computational resources and in a fast time.

HTC-DC Net: Monocular Height Estimation from Single Remote Sensing Images

3D geo-information is of great significance for understanding the living environment; however, 3D perception from remote sensing data, especially on a large scale, is restricted. To tackle this problem, we propose a method for monocular height estimation from optical imagery, which is currently one of the richest sources of remote sensing data. As an ill-posed problem, monocular height estimation requires well-designed networks for enhanced representations to improve performance. Moreover, the distribution of height values is long-tailed with the low-height pixels, e.g., the background, as the head, and thus trained networks are usually biased and tend to underestimate building heights. To solve the problems, instead of formalizing the problem as a regression task, we propose HTC-DC Net following the classification-regression paradigm, with the head-tail cut (HTC) and the distribution-based constraints (DCs) as the main contributions. HTC-DC Net is composed of the backbone network as the feature extractor, the HTC-AdaBins module, and the hybrid regression process. The HTC-AdaBins module serves as the classification phase to determine bins adaptive to each input image. It is equipped with a vision transformer encoder to incorporate local context with holistic information and involves an HTC to address the long-tailed problem in monocular height estimation for balancing the performances of foreground and background pixels. The hybrid regression process does the regression via the smoothing of bins from the classification phase, which is trained via DCs. The proposed network is tested on three datasets of different resolutions, namely ISPRS Vaihingen (0.09 m), DFC19 (1.3 m) and GBH (3 m). Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed network over existing methods by large margins. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each design component.

Self-supervised Domain-agnostic Domain Adaptation for Satellite Images

Domain shift caused by, e.g., different geographical regions or acquisition conditions is a common issue in machine learning for global scale satellite image processing. A promising method to address this problem is domain adaptation, where the training and the testing datasets are split into two or multiple domains according to their distributions, and an adaptation method is applied to improve the generalizability of the model on the testing dataset. However, defining the domain to which each satellite image belongs is not trivial, especially under large-scale multi-temporal and multi-sensory scenarios, where a single image mosaic could be generated from multiple data sources. In this paper, we propose an self-supervised domain-agnostic domain adaptation (SS(DA)2) method to perform domain adaptation without such a domain definition. To achieve this, we first design a contrastive generative adversarial loss to train a generative network to perform image-to-image translation between any two satellite image patches. Then, we improve the generalizability of the downstream models by augmenting the training data with different testing spectral characteristics. The experimental results on public benchmarks verify the effectiveness of SS(DA)2.

Few-shot Object Detection in Remote Sensing: Lifting the Curse of Incompletely Annotated Novel Objects

Object detection is an essential and fundamental task in computer vision and satellite image processing. Existing deep learning methods have achieved impressive performance thanks to the availability of large-scale annotated datasets. Yet, in real-world applications the availability of labels is limited. In this context, few-shot object detection (FSOD) has emerged as a promising direction, which aims at enabling the model to detect novel objects with only few of them annotated. However, many existing FSOD algorithms overlook a critical issue: when an input image contains multiple novel objects and only a subset of them are annotated, the unlabeled objects will be considered as background during training. This can cause confusions and severely impact the model's ability to recall novel objects. To address this issue, we propose a self-training-based FSOD (ST-FSOD) approach, which incorporates the self-training mechanism into the few-shot fine-tuning process. ST-FSOD aims to enable the discovery of novel objects that are not annotated, and take them into account during training. On the one hand, we devise a two-branch region proposal networks (RPN) to separate the proposal extraction of base and novel objects, On another hand, we incorporate the student-teacher mechanism into RPN and the region of interest (RoI) head to include those highly confident yet unlabeled targets as pseudo labels. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in various FSOD settings by a large margin. The codes will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/ST-FSOD.