Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition for the Analysis of 2D/3D Remote Sensing Data in Geoscience: A Survey

Abstract

Historically, geoscience has been a prominent domain for applications of computer vision and pattern recognition. The numerous challenges associated with geoscience-related imaging data, which include poor imaging quality, noise, missing values, lack of precise boundaries defining various geoscience objects and processes, as well as non-stationarity in space and/or time, provide an ideal test bed for advanced computer vision techniques. On the other hand, the developments in pattern recognition, especially with the rapid evolution of powerful graphical processing units (GPUs) and the subsequent deep learning breakthrough, enable valuable computational tools, which can aid geoscientists in important problems, such as land cover mapping, target detection, pattern mining in imaging data, boundary extraction and change detection. In this landscape, classical computer vision approaches, such as active contours, superpixels, or descriptor-guided classification, provide alternatives that remain relevant when domain expert labelling of large sample collections is often not feasible. This issue persists, despite efforts for the standardization of geoscience datasets, such as Microsoft’s effort for AI on Earth, or Google Earth. This work covers developments in applications of computer vision and pattern recognition on geoscience-related imaging data, following both pre-deep learning and post-deep learning paradigms. Various imaging modalities are addressed, including: multispectral images, hyperspectral images (HSIs), synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, point clouds obtained from light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors or digital elevation models (DEMs).