AiTLAS: Artificial Intelligence Toolbox for Earth Observation

Abstract

We propose AiTLAS—an open-source, state-of-the-art toolbox for exploratory and predictive analysis of satellite imagery. It implements a range of deep-learning architectures and models tailored for the EO tasks illustrated in this case. The versatility and applicability of the toolbox are showcased in a variety of EO tasks, including image scene classification, semantic image segmentation, object detection, and crop type prediction. These use cases demonstrate the potential of the toolbox to support the complete data analysis pipeline starting from data preparation and understanding, through learning novel models or fine-tuning existing ones, using models for making predictions on unseen images, and up to analysis and understanding of the predictions and the predictive performance yielded by the models. AiTLAS brings the AI and EO communities together by facilitating the use of EO data in the AI community and accelerating the uptake of (advanced) machine-learning methods and approaches by EO experts. It achieves this by providing: (1) user-friendly, accessible, and interoperable resources for data analysis through easily configurable and readily usable pipelines; (2) standardized, verifiable, and reusable data handling, wrangling, and pre-processing approaches for constructing AI-ready data; (3) modular and configurable modeling approaches and (pre-trained) models; and (4) standardized and reproducible benchmark protocols including data and models.

Keywords

• Earth observation
• remote sensing
• deep learning
• semantic segmentation
• object detection
• land use and land cover classification