Stella X. Yu : Papers / Google Scholar

Multi-Spectral Image Classification with Ultra-Lean Complex-Valued Models
Utkarsh Singhal and Stella X. Yu and Zackery Steck and Scott Kangas and Aaron A. Reite
Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on AI for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response, New Orleans, Louisiana, 3 December 2022
Paper | Slides

Abstract
Multi-spectral imagery is invaluable for remote sensing due to different spectral signatures exhibited by materials that often appear identical in greyscale and RGB imagery. Paired with modern deep learning methods, this modality has great potential utility in a variety of remote sensing applications, such as humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery efforts. State-of-the-art deep learning methods have greatly benefited from large-scale annotations like in ImageNet, but existing MSI image datasets lack annotations at a similar scale. As an alternative to transfer learning on such data with few annotations, we apply complex-valued co-domain symmetric models to classify real-valued MSI images. Our experiments on 8-band xView data show that our ultra-lean model trained on xView from scratch without data augmentations can outperform ResNet with data augmentation and modified transfer learning on xView. Our work is the first to demonstrate the value of complex-valued deep learning on real-valued MSI data.

Keywords
complex-valued deep learning, co-domain symmetry, multi-spectral images