Creating Large scale Datasets for Object Detection in Satellite Imagery

Gopal Erinjippurath, Director of Analytics Engineering, talks about how to create Large scale Datasets for Object Detection in Satellite Imagery.

By imaging the entirety of Earth’s landmass every day at 3.7m resolution and enabling on-demand follow up imagery at 80cm resolution, Planet offers a uniquely valuable dataset for creating datasets for imagery analytics over varied context. We introduce Planet imagery towards creating large scale datasets for object detection and localization and associated analytics. We describe workflows for data collection and aggregation and demonstrate the results of experiments with baseline state of the art deep learning based object detection models (Faster RCNN and SSD) for object detection and localization. We also describe a few early experiments with transferability of object localization between datasets from different satellite constellations. These approaches are then applied towards localizing objects of relevance towards federal disaster response and emergency management efforts. We showcase examples of our imagery, objects of relevance and detections from the baseline model in disaster regions.

Speaker Bio:

Gopal manages the Imagery Analytics Engineering team at Planet Inc. His background is in the development of foundational technology that powers products in the imaging and machine learning space.

He is known for agile engineering execution from concept to scalable high quality products.

Gopal’s recent experience is in industry-leading analytics products from early concept demonstrations to multiple customers at Captricity and Harvesting, where he advised the CEO. Previously he led the algorithm engineering development of Dolby’s first imaging display product, the Emmy Award winning Dolby Professional Reference Monitor and technologies for high dynamic range video reproduction in Dolby Vision, now in the iPhone X.

Gopal holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California and completed the Ignite Program, connecting technologists with new commercial ventures, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.