Extracting building heights from satellite images is an active research area used in many fields such as telecommunications, city planning, etc. Many studies utilize DSM (Digital Surface Models) generated with lidars or stereo images for this purpose. Predicting the height of the buildings using only RGB images is challenging due to the insufficient amount of data, low data quality, variations of building types, different angles of light and shadow, etc. In this study, we present an instance segmentation-based building height extraction method to predict building masks with their respective heights from a single RGB satellite image. We used satellite images with building height annotations of certain cities along with an open-source satellite dataset with the transfer learning approach. We reached, the bounding box mAP 59, the mask mAP 52.6, and the average accuracy value of 70% for buildings belonging to each height class in our test set.

Researchers are doing intensive work on satellite images due to the information it contains with the development of computer vision algorithms and the ease of accessibility to satellite images. Building segmentation of satellite images can be used for many potential applications such as city, agricultural, and communication network planning. However, since no dataset exists for every region, the model trained in a region must gain generality. In this study, we trained several models in China and post-processing work was done on the best model selected among them. These models are evaluated in the Chicago region of the INRIA dataset. As can be seen from the results, although state-of-art results in this area have not been achieved, the results are promising. We aim to present our initial experimental results of a building segmentation from satellite images in this study.

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a semi-supervised segmentation method for extracting roads from sattelite images. Artificial Neural Networks and image segmentation methods are among the most successful methods for extracting road data from satellite images. However, these models require large amounts of training data from different regions to achieve high accuracy rates. In cases where this data needs to be of more quantity or quality, it is a standard method to train deep neural networks by transferring knowledge from annotated data obtained from different sources. This study proposes a method that performs path segmentation with semi-supervised learning methods. A semi-supervised field adaptation method based on pseudo-labeling and Minimum Class Confusion method has been proposed, and it has been observed to increase performance in targeted datasets.

Transfer Learning methods are widely used in satellite image segmentation problems and improve performance upon classical supervised learning methods. In this study, we present a semantic segmentation method that allows us to make land cover maps by using transfer learning methods. We compare models trained in low-resolution images with insufficient data for the targeted region or zoom level. In order to boost performance on target data we experiment with models trained with unsupervised, semi-supervised and supervised transfer learning approaches, including satellite images from public datasets and other unlabeled sources. According to experimental results, transfer learning improves segmentation performance 3.4% MIoU (Mean Intersection over Union) in rural regions and 12.9% MIoU in urban regions. We observed that transfer learning is more effective when two datasets share a comparable zoom level and are labeled with identical rules; otherwise, semi-supervised learning is more effective by using the data as unlabeled. In addition, experiments showed that HRNet outperformed building segmentation approaches in multi-class segmentation.

Using Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems with extensive sensing arrangements on every civil structure can be costly and impractical. Various concepts have been introduced to alleviate such difficulties, such as Population-based SHM (PBSHM). Nevertheless, the studies presented in the literature do not adequately address the challenge of accessing the information on different structural states (conditions) of dissimilar civil structures. The study herein introduces a novel framework named Structural State Translation (SST), which aims to estimate the response data of different civil structures based on the information obtained from a dissimilar structure. SST can be defined as Translating a state of one civil structure to another state after discovering and learning the domain-invariant representation in the source domains of a dissimilar civil structure. SST employs a Domain-Generalized Cycle-Generative (DGCG) model to learn the domain-invariant representation in the acceleration datasets obtained from a numeric bridge structure that is in two different structural conditions. In other words, the model is tested on three dissimilar numeric bridge models to translate their structural conditions. The evaluation results of SST via Mean Magnitude-Squared Coherence (MMSC) and modal identifiers showed that the translated bridge states (synthetic states) are significantly similar to the real ones. As such, the minimum and maximum average MMSC values of real and translated bridge states are 91.2% and 97.1%, the minimum and the maximum difference in natural frequencies are 5.71% and 0%, and the minimum and maximum Modal Assurance Criterion (MAC) values are 0.998 and 0.870. This study is critical for data scarcity and PBSHM, as it demonstrates that it is possible to obtain data from structures while the structure is actually in a different condition or state.

Though impressive success has been witnessed in computer vision, deep learning still suffers from the domain shift challenge when the target domain for testing and the source domain for training do not share an identical distribution. To address this, domain generalization approaches intend to extract domain invariant features that can lead to a more robust model. Hence, increasing the source domain diversity is a key component of domain generalization. Style augmentation takes advantage of instance-specific feature statistics containing informative style characteristics to synthetic novel domains. However, all previous works ignored the correlation between different feature channels or only limited the style augmentation through linear interpolation. In this work, we propose a novel augmentation method, called \textit{Correlated Style Uncertainty (CSU)}, to go beyond the linear interpolation of style statistic space while preserving the essential correlation information. We validate our method's effectiveness by extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain classification tasks, including widely used PACS, Office-Home, Camelyon17 datasets and the Duke-Market1501 instance retrieval task and obtained significant margin improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available for public use.

The promise of Mobile Health (mHealth) is the ability to use wearable sensors to monitor participant physiology at high frequencies during daily life to enable temporally-precise health interventions. However, a major challenge is frequent missing data. Despite a rich imputation literature, existing techniques are ineffective for the pulsative signals which comprise many mHealth applications, and a lack of available datasets has stymied progress. We address this gap with PulseImpute, the first large-scale pulsative signal imputation challenge which includes realistic mHealth missingness models, an extensive set of baselines, and clinically-relevant downstream tasks. Our baseline models include a novel transformer-based architecture designed to exploit the structure of pulsative signals. We hope that PulseImpute will enable the ML community to tackle this significant and challenging task.

As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

Antrophonegic pressure (i.e. human influence) on the environment is one of the largest causes of the loss of biological diversity. Wilderness areas, in contrast, are home to undisturbed ecological processes. However, there is no biophysical definition of the term wilderness. Instead, wilderness is more of a philosophical or cultural concept and thus cannot be easily delineated or categorized in a technical manner. With this paper, (i) we introduce the task of wilderness mapping by means of machine learning applied to satellite imagery (ii) and publish MapInWild, a large-scale benchmark dataset curated for that task. MapInWild is a multi-modal dataset and comprises various geodata acquired and formed from a diverse set of Earth observation sensors. The dataset consists of 8144 images with a shape of 1920 x 1920 pixels and is approximately 350 GB in size. The images are weakly annotated with three classes derived from the World Database of Protected Areas - Strict Nature Reserves, Wilderness Areas, and National Parks. With the dataset, which shall serve as a testbed for developments in fields such as explainable machine learning and environmental remote sensing, we hope to contribute to a deepening of our understanding of the question "What makes nature wild?".

We present a data-driven framework to automate the vectorization and machine interpretation of 2D engineering part drawings. In industrial settings, most manufacturing engineers still rely on manual reads to identify the topological and manufacturing requirements from drawings submitted by designers. The interpretation process is laborious and time-consuming, which severely inhibits the efficiency of part quotation and manufacturing tasks. While recent advances in image-based computer vision methods have demonstrated great potential in interpreting natural images through semantic segmentation approaches, the application of such methods in parsing engineering technical drawings into semantically accurate components remains a significant challenge. The severe pixel sparsity in engineering drawings also restricts the effective featurization of image-based data-driven methods. To overcome these challenges, we propose a deep learning based framework that predicts the semantic type of each vectorized component. Taking a raster image as input, we vectorize all components through thinning, stroke tracing, and cubic bezier fitting. Then a graph of such components is generated based on the connectivity between the components. Finally, a graph convolutional neural network is trained on this graph data to identify the semantic type of each component. We test our framework in the context of semantic segmentation of text, dimension and, contour components in engineering drawings. Results show that our method yields the best performance compared to recent image, and graph-based segmentation methods.