DeepEmSat: Deep Emulation for Satellite Data Mining

• Main Authors: Kate Duffy, Thomas Vandal, Shuang Li, Sangram Ganguly, Ramakrishna Nemani, Auroop R. Ganguly
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2019-12-01
• Series: Frontiers in Big Data
• Subjects: remote sensing; machine learning; deep learning; atmospheric correction; emulator
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fdata.2019.00042/full

The growing volume of Earth science data available from climate simulations and satellite remote sensing offers unprecedented opportunity for scientific insight, while also presenting computational challenges. One potential area of impact is atmospheric correction, where physics-based numerical models retrieve surface reflectance information from top of atmosphere observations, and are too computationally intensive to be run in real time. Machine learning methods have demonstrated potential as fast statistical models for expensive simulations and for extracting credible insights from complex datasets. Here, we develop DeepEmSat: a deep learning emulator approach for atmospheric correction, and offer comparison against physics-based models to support the hypothesis that deep learning can make a contribution to the efficient processing of satellite images.