HADR Application
Team HARDCARRY
Leo Xi Ning
1. LAND COVER CLASSIFICATION
Land cover classification is essential to provide contextual information
for feature interpretation in the form of physical land type. In a disaster
event, this will also help to alert response teams of the appropriate form
of help required.
Among the many classifiers that were considered, Maximum Likelihood
(ML) was chosen due to its satisfactory performance coupled with an
efficient rate that allows response teams to respond quickly in analyzing
satellite images. While ML requires a strong training set, teams should
have access to a sufficiently extensive dataset
By using pixels’ spectral signatures as classes, after running samples of
spectral signatures through the ML classifier, it should be able to identify
the physical land type in the satellite image. ML evaluates the mean and
covariance of the reflective reflectance, boosting its accuracy metrics as
taking into account only one or another can cause false negatives and
false positives.
3. SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION
Some issues that current methods face are:
 
- Inability to take into account the changing of seasons, resulting in
many false negatives and false positives.
- Unscalable due to massive training sets required.
 
Hence, we suggest the use of Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) to
identify if a feature is damaged or functional. FCN are essentially
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), with the last fully connected layer
being replaced by another convolution layer. Its advantages include
having no limitations on the input image size, which is a limitation for
CNNs).
For configuration of the FCN architecture, FCN-8s would be the best
choice over FCN-32s or FCN-16s – 8x upsampling is done to the output
resizing the output to the input size. This reduces the loss of spatial
information, improving the accuracy of the results. The upsampling will
be done via a transposed convolution. (not to be used interchangeably
with deconvolution)
FCNs will be trained with damaged and undamaged features as the
binary classes, with damaged features as reference dataset. Each pixel
will then be labelled between the two classes.
 
REFERENCES
Yuheng, Hao, & Yan. (2017, July 7). Image Segmentation Algorithms Overview.
Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.02051
 
Fraile, J. G. (2019, March 27). Data Science and Satellite Imagery. Retrieved
from https://towardsdatascience.com/data-science-and-satellite-imagery-
985229e1cd2f
AI in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response. (2019, September 18).
Retrieved from https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/library/asset-view.cfm?
assetid=634757
And many others, as cited in the report submitted
 
RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2019
www.PosterPresentations.com
2. IMAGE SEGMENTATION
Image segmentation is applied in stead of more common methods of
image pre-processing such as resizing and minimum distance to mean.
It serves to quicken computational speed and reduce the overall time
taken for the analysis.
We propose the hybridization of regional growth segmentation and
regional merging segmentation to accurately identify and extract
relevant features.
 
Regional growth has many advantages, the main standouts being good
segmentation results and boundary information. However, noise and/or
irregularities do occur, especially due to environmental heterogeneity.
Implementation of regional merging as a second step helps to eliminate
these irregularities by merging similar regions based on their difference
in grayscale pixel values and strength of boundaries between them.
4. FURTHER DEVELOPMENT
As ML is a pixel-based classifier, Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA)
should be considered to improve accuracy metrics.
 
Performing land use classification in addition to land cover classification
would improve accuracy as well.
DISASTER PLAN
Fig 1.1 – Post-disaster satellite image
Upon obtaining the image, the application will primarily begin with land
over classification to inform response teams of the type of assistance
required based on its physical land type. For example, you would
require a different response for a wildfire in a jungle as compared to a
wildfire in a forest. The application will then report that Fig 1.1 occurred
in a forest.
The next step will be the image segmentation. It should be able to
identify and extract relevant features such as pathways that rescue
vehicles can travel on. These features however, may be damaged or
blocked due to the disaster event so they will be further analyzed with
semantic segmentation.
FCNs will classify the features as either damaged or undamaged and
report its status. If a pathway is blocked by a fallen tree, it will be
classified as damaged, preventing assistance teams from taking that
route.
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Acknowledgements: Jigar Doshi, for patiently answering questions through
twitter, & Prof. Soh Wee Seng, for an immensely helpful starting point