TY - GEN
T1 - Geomorphological analysis using unpiloted aircraft systems, structure from motion, and deep learning
AU - Chen, Zhiang
AU - Scott, Tyler R.
AU - Bearman, Sarah
AU - Anand, Harish
AU - Keating, Devin
AU - Scott, Chelsea
AU - Arrowsmith, J. Ramon
AU - Das, Jnaneshwar
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 IEEE.
PY - 2020/10/24
Y1 - 2020/10/24
N2 - We present a pipeline for geomorphological analysis that uses structure from motion (SfM) and deep learning on close-range aerial imagery to estimate spatial distributions of rock traits (size, roundness, and orientation) along a tectonic fault scarp. The properties of the rocks on the fault scarp derive from the combination of initial volcanic fracturing and subsequent tectonic and geomorphic fracturing, and our pipeline allows scientists to leverage UAS-based imagery to gain a better understanding of such surface processes. We start by using SfM on aerial imagery to produce georeferenced orthomosaics and digital elevation models (DEM). A human expert then annotates rocks on a set of image tiles sampled from the orthomosaics, and these annotations are used to train a deep neural network to detect and segment individual rocks in the entire site. The extracted semantic information (rock masks) on large volumes of unlabeled, high-resolution SfM products allows subsequent structural analysis and shape descriptors to estimate rock size, roundness, and orientation. We present results of two experiments conducted along a fault scarp in the Volcanic Tablelands near Bishop, California. We conducted the first, proof-of-concept experiment with a DJI Phantom 4 Pro equipped with an RGB camera and inspected if elevation information assisted instance segmentation from RGB channels. Rock-trait histograms along and across the fault scarp were obtained with the neural network inference. In the second experiment, we deployed a hexrotor and a multispectral camera to produce a DEM and five spectral orthomosaics in red, green, blue, red edge, and near infrared. We focused on examining the effectiveness of different combinations of input channels in instance segmentation.
AB - We present a pipeline for geomorphological analysis that uses structure from motion (SfM) and deep learning on close-range aerial imagery to estimate spatial distributions of rock traits (size, roundness, and orientation) along a tectonic fault scarp. The properties of the rocks on the fault scarp derive from the combination of initial volcanic fracturing and subsequent tectonic and geomorphic fracturing, and our pipeline allows scientists to leverage UAS-based imagery to gain a better understanding of such surface processes. We start by using SfM on aerial imagery to produce georeferenced orthomosaics and digital elevation models (DEM). A human expert then annotates rocks on a set of image tiles sampled from the orthomosaics, and these annotations are used to train a deep neural network to detect and segment individual rocks in the entire site. The extracted semantic information (rock masks) on large volumes of unlabeled, high-resolution SfM products allows subsequent structural analysis and shape descriptors to estimate rock size, roundness, and orientation. We present results of two experiments conducted along a fault scarp in the Volcanic Tablelands near Bishop, California. We conducted the first, proof-of-concept experiment with a DJI Phantom 4 Pro equipped with an RGB camera and inspected if elevation information assisted instance segmentation from RGB channels. Rock-trait histograms along and across the fault scarp were obtained with the neural network inference. In the second experiment, we deployed a hexrotor and a multispectral camera to produce a DEM and five spectral orthomosaics in red, green, blue, red edge, and near infrared. We focused on examining the effectiveness of different combinations of input channels in instance segmentation.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85102406896&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341354
DO - 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341354
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85102406896
T3 - IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
SP - 1276
EP - 1283
BT - 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2020
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2020
Y2 - 24 October 2020 through 24 January 2021
ER -