A Unified Framework for Anomaly Detection of Satellite Images Based on Well-Designed Features and an Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

Nowadays, as the number of remote sensing satellites launched and applied in China has been mounting, relevant institutions’ workload of processing raw satellite images to be distributed to users is also growing. However, due to factors such as extreme atmospheric conditions, diversification of on-board device status, data loss during transmission and algorithm issues of ground systems, defect of image quality is inevitable, including abnormal color, color cast, data missing, obvious stitching line between Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs), and inconstant radiation values between CCDs. Product application has also been impeded. This study presents a unified framework based on well-designed features an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to automatically identify defective images. Samples were collected to form the dataset for training and validation, systematic experiments designed to verify the effectiveness of the features, and the optimal network architecture of ANN determined. Moreover, an effective method was proposed to explain the inference of ANN based on local gradient approximation. The recall of our final model reached 81.18% and F1 score 80.13%, verifying the effectiveness of our method.

Keywords

• image quality assessment
• anomaly detection
• artificial neural network
• local gradient approximation