Radiant.Earth is hosting a 2 day technical workshop 14-15 June, 2018 in Washington, D.C. Goal is to discuss and develop specifications for the global LC labeled training dataset by aggregating inputs from all participants.
- Generating an inclusive hierarchical taxonomy of LC classes at global scale;
- Defining specifications of the signature library for labeling and metadata storage;
- Reviewing, examining and documenting best practices for using ML with satellite imagery for LC classification; and
- Identifying knowledge gaps.
Full list of participants is available here. Each participant is assigned to a working group.
To achieve the goals of this meeting, three topic-specific working groups will address the following during the breakout sessions:
- Working Group 1: Land Cover Taxonomy
This group focuses on developing the hierarchical LC class taxonomy. Participants will use current taxonomies as a baseline and develop the globally inclusive LC class taxonomy which has a hierarchical structure. The purpose of this groups is to document a LC taxonomy that would allow using satellite/airborne observations with different Ground Sampling Distances (GSD) and generate LC labels which could be validated/evaluated against other products with different GSD. A non- inclusive list of the topics to be discussed:
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How many levels would be necessary for the hierarchical taxonomy?
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How to relate those levels to specific GSD?
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What should be the land cover classes on each level?
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How to allow new classes that might emerge in future be included in the taxonomy?
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Best strategy for collecting a representative and diverse set of image tiles at global scale to include all major land cover classes.
(Additional topics may emerge from the morning session).
- Working Group 2: Machine Learning Algorithms
This group will review and document best practices in using ML for LC classification. A non- inclusive list of the topics to be discussed:
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How to achieve higher accuracies within each class, and between different classes?
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What should be the metric for measuring training data diversity?
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How to improve the quality of training data?
(Additional topics may emerge from the morning session).
- Working Group 3: Training data specifications
This group will develop specifications for LC labels to be stored in the imagery metadata. The goal would be to use the Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalogue (STAC) for this purpose, and design specifications for labels to be stored in imagery with Cloud-Optimized Geotiff (COG) format. A non- inclusive list of the topics to be discussed:
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How to store labels and any parameters associated with those (such as uncertainty) in COG format?
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How to incorporate the LC taxonomy level (from WG 1) into the metadata?
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How to use imagery metadata to sample a representative set of tiles at global scale?
(Additional topics may emerge from the morning session).