Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Representation Learning For Earth Observation, Pallavi Jain, Bianca Schoen Phelan, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

Self-Supervised learning (SSL) has reduced the performance gap between supervised and unsupervised learning, due to its ability to learn invariant representations. This is a boon to the domains like Earth Observation (EO), where labelled data availability is scarce but unlabelled data is freely available. While Transfer Learning from generic RGB pre-trained models is still common-place in EO, we argue that, it is essential to have good EO domain specific pre-trained model in order to use with downstream tasks with limited labelled data. Hence, we explored the applicability of SSL with multi-modal satellite imagery for downstream tasks. For this we utilised …

Pothole Detection Under Diverse Conditions Using Object Detection Models, Ibrahim Hassan Syed, Dympna O'Sullivan, Susan Mckeever

Conference papers

One of the most important tasks in road maintenance is the detection of potholes. This process is usually done through manual visual inspection, where certified engineers assess recorded images of pavements acquired using cameras or professional road assessment vehicles. Machine learning techniques are now being applied to this problem, with models trained to automatically identify road conditions. However, approaching this real-world problem with machine learning techniques presents the classic problem of how to produce generalisable models. Images and videos may be captured in different illumination conditions, with different camera types, camera angles, and resolutions. In this paper, we present our …

Just-In-Time Biomass Yield Estimation With Multi-Modal Data And Variable Patch Training Size, Patricia O'Byrne, Patrick Jackman Dr., Damon Dr. Berry Dr., Thomas Lee, Michael French, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

The just-in-time estimation of farmland traits such as biomass yield can aid considerably in the optimisation of agricultural processes. Data in domains such as precision farming is however notoriously expensive to collect and deep learning driven modelling approaches need to maximise performance but also acknowledge this reality. In this paper we present a study in which a platform was deployed to collect data from a heterogeneous collection of sensor types including visual, NIR, and LiDAR sources to estimate key pastureland traits. In addition to introducing the study itself we address two key research questions. The first of these was the …

Brexit: Psychometric Profiling The Political Salubrious Through Machine Learning: Predicting Personality Traits Of Boris Johnson Through Twitter Political Text, James Usher, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

Whilst the CIA have been using psychometric profiling for decades, Cambridge Analytica showed that people's psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook or Twitter accounts. To exploit this form of psychological assessment from digital footprints, we propose machine learning methods for assessing political personality from Twitter. We have extracted the tweet content of Prime Minster Boris Johnson’s Twitter account and built three predictive personality models based on his Twitter political content. We use a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural network, a Naive Bayes multinomial model and a Support Machine Vector model to predict the OCEAN …

Multi-Spectral Visual Crop Assessment Under Limited Data Constraints, Patricia O'Byrne, Patrick Jackman, Damon Berry, Hector-Hugo Franco-Penya, Michael French, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

In an era of climate change and global population growth, deep learning based multi-spectral imaging has the potential to significantly assist in production management across a wide range of agricultural and food production domains. A key challenge however in applying state-of-the-art methods is that they, unlike classical hand crafted methods, are usually thought of as being only useful when significant amounts of data are available. In this paper we investigate this hypothesis by examining the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning methods when applied to a restricted data set that is not easily bootstrapped through pre-trained image processing networks. We demonstrate …

A Multi-Task Approach To Incremental Dialogue State Tracking, Anh Duong Trinh, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Incrementality is a fundamental feature of language in real world use. To this point, however, the vast majority of work in automated dialogue processing has focused on language as turn based. In this paper we explore the challenge of incremental dialogue state tracking through the development and analysis of a multi-task approach to incremental dialogue state tracking. We present the design of our incremental dialogue state tracker in detail and provide evaluation against the well known Dialogue State Tracking Challenge 2 (DSTC2) dataset. In addition to a standard evaluation of the tracker, we also provide an analysis of the Incrementality …

Generating Diverse And Meaningful Captions: Unsupervised Specificity Optimization For Image Captioning, Annika Lindh, Robert J. Ross, Abhijit Mahalunkar, Giancarlo Salton, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Image Captioning is a task that requires models to acquire a multi-modal understanding of the world and to express this understanding in natural language text. While the state-of-the-art for this task has rapidly improved in terms of n-gram metrics, these models tend to output the same generic captions for similar images. In this work, we address this limitation and train a model that generates more diverse and specific captions through an unsupervised training approach that incorporates a learning signal from an Image Retrieval model. We summarize previous results and improve the state-of-the-art on caption diversity and novelty.

We make our …

Investigating The Impact Of Unsupervised Feature-Extraction From Multi-Wavelength Image Data For Photometric Classification Of Stars, Galaxies And Qsos, Annika Lindh

Conference papers

Accurate classification of astronomical objects currently relies on spectroscopic data. Acquiring this data is time-consuming and expensive compared to photometric data. Hence, improving the accuracy of photometric classification could lead to far better coverage and faster classification pipelines. This paper investigates the benefit of using unsupervised feature-extraction from multi-wavelength image data for photometric classification of stars, galaxies and QSOs. An unsupervised Deep Belief Network is used, giving the model a higher level of interpretability thanks to its generative nature and layer-wise training. A Random Forest classifier is used to measure the contribution of the novel features compared to a set …