Self-supervised Learning in Remote Sensing: A Review

In deep learning research, self-supervised learning (SSL) has received great attention triggering interest within both the computer vision and remote sensing communities. While there has been a big success in computer vision, most of the potential of SSL in the domain of earth observation remains locked. In this paper, we provide an introduction to, and a review of the concepts and latest developments in SSL for computer vision in the context of remote sensing. Further, we provide a preliminary benchmark of modern SSL algorithms on popular remote sensing datasets, verifying the potential of SSL in remote sensing and providing an extended study on data augmentations. Finally, we identify a list of promising directions of future research in SSL for earth observation (SSL4EO) to pave the way for fruitful interaction of both domains.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine. 32 pages, 22 content page

Statistical and Graph-Based Signal Processing: Fundamental Results and Application to Cardiac Electrophysiology

The goal of cardiac electrophysiology is to obtain information about the mechanism, function, and performance of the electrical activities of the heart, the identification of deviation from normal pattern and the design of treatments. Offering a better insight into cardiac arrhythmias comprehension and management, signal processing can help the physician to enhance the treatment strategies, in particular in case of atrial fibrillation (AF), a very common atrial arrhythmia which is associated to significant morbidities, such as increased risk of mortality, heart failure, and thromboembolic events. Catheter ablation of AF is a therapeutic technique which uses radiofrequency energy to destroy atrial tissue involved in the arrhythmia sustenance, typically aiming at the electrical disconnection of the of the pulmonary veins triggers. However, recurrence rate is still very high, showing that the very complex and heterogeneous nature of AF still represents a challenging problem. Leveraging the tools of non-stationary and statistical signal processing, the first part of our work has a twofold focus: firstly, we compare the performance of two different ablation technologies, based on contact force sensing or remote magnetic controlled, using signal-based criteria as surrogates for lesion assessment. Furthermore, we investigate the role of ablation parameters in lesion formation using the late-gadolinium enhanced magnetic resonance imaging. Secondly, we hypothesized that in human atria the frequency content of the bipolar signal is directly related to the local conduction velocity (CV), a key parameter characterizing the substrate abnormality and influencing atrial arrhythmias. Comparing the degree of spectral compression among signals recorded at different points of the endocardial surface in response to decreasing pacing rate, our experimental data demonstrate a significant correlation between CV and the corresponding spectral centroids. However, complex spatio-temporal propagation pattern characterizing AF spurred the need for new signals acquisition and processing methods. Multi-electrode catheters allow whole-chamber panoramic mapping of electrical activity but produce an amount of data which need to be preprocessed and analyzed to provide clinically relevant support to the physician. Graph signal processing has shown its potential on a variety of applications involving high-dimensional data on irregular domains and complex network. Nevertheless, though state-of-the-art graph-based methods have been successful for many tasks, so far they predominantly ignore the time-dimension of data. To address this shortcoming, in the second part of this dissertation, we put forth a Time-Vertex Signal Processing Framework, as a particular case of the multi-dimensional graph signal processing. Linking together the time-domain signal processing techniques with the tools of GSP, the Time-Vertex Signal Processing facilitates the analysis of graph structured data which also evolve in time. We motivate our framework leveraging the notion of partial differential equations on graphs. We introduce joint operators, such as time-vertex localization and we present a novel approach to significantly improve the accuracy of fast joint filtering. We also illustrate how to build time-vertex dictionaries, providing conditions for efficient invertibility and examples of constructions. The experimental results on a variety of datasets suggest that the proposed tools can bring significant benefits in various signal processing and learning tasks involving time-series on graphs. We close the gap between the two parts illustrating the application of graph and time-vertex signal processing to the challenging case of multi-channels intracardiac signals

Unsupervised Machine-Learning Applications in Seismology

Catalogs of seismic source parameters (hypocenter locations, origin times, and magnitudes) are vital for studying various Earth processes, greatly enhancing our understanding of the nature of seismic events, the structure of the Earth, and the dynamics of fault systems. Modern seismic analyses utilize supervised machine learning (ML) to build enhanced catalogs based on millions of examples of analyst-picked phase-arrivals in waveforms, yet the ability to characterize the time-varying spectral content of the waveforms underlying those catalogs remains lacking. Unsupervised machine learning (UML) methods provide powerful tools for inferring patterns from musical spectrograms with little a priori information, yet has been relatively underutilized in the field of seismology. In this thesis, I leverage advanced tools from UML to analyze the temporal spectral content of large sets of spectrograms generated by different mechanisms in two distinct geologic settings: icequakes and tremors at Gornergletscher (a Swiss temperate glacier) and repeating earthquakes from a 10-km-long creeping segment of the San Andreas Fault. The core algorithm in this work, now known as Spectral Unsupervised Feature Extraction, or SpecUFEx, extracts time-varying frequency patterns from spectrograms and reduces them into low-dimensionality fingerprints via a combination of non-negative matrix factorization and hidden Markov Modeling (Holtzman et al. 2018), optimized for large data sets via stochastic variational inference. This work describes the SpecUFEx algorithm and the suite of preprocessing, clustering, and visualization tools developed to create an UML workflow, SpecUFEx+, that is widely-accessible and applicable for many seismic settings. I apply theSpecUFEx+ workflow to single- and multi-station seismic data from Gornergletscher, and demonstrate how some fingerprint-clusters track diurnal tremor related to subglacial water flow, while others correspond to the onset of the subglacial and englacial components of a glacial lake outburst flood. I also discover periods of harmonic tremor localized near the ice-bed interface that may be related to glacial stick-slip sliding. I additionally apply the SpecUFEx+ workflow to earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault to unveil far more repeating earthquake sequences than previously inferred, leading to enhanced slip-rate estimates at seismogenic depths and providing a more detailed image of seismic gaps along the fault interface. Unsupervised feature extraction is a novel tool to the field of seismology. This work demonstrates how scientific insight can be gained through the characterization of the spectral-temporal patterns of large seismic datasets within an UML-framework

Artificial Intelligence for Science in Quantum, Atomistic, and Continuum Systems

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are fueling a new paradigm of discoveries in natural sciences. Today, AI has started to advance natural sciences by improving, accelerating, and enabling our understanding of natural phenomena at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, giving rise to a new area of research known as AI for science (AI4Science). Being an emerging research paradigm, AI4Science is unique in that it is an enormous and highly interdisciplinary area. Thus, a unified and technical treatment of this field is needed yet challenging. This work aims to provide a technically thorough account of a subarea of AI4Science; namely, AI for quantum, atomistic, and continuum systems. These areas aim at understanding the physical world from the subatomic (wavefunctions and electron density), atomic (molecules, proteins, materials, and interactions), to macro (fluids, climate, and subsurface) scales and form an important subarea of AI4Science. A unique advantage of focusing on these areas is that they largely share a common set of challenges, thereby allowing a unified and foundational treatment. A key common challenge is how to capture physics first principles, especially symmetries, in natural systems by deep learning methods. We provide an in-depth yet intuitive account of techniques to achieve equivariance to symmetry transformations. We also discuss other common technical challenges, including explainability, out-of-distribution generalization, knowledge transfer with foundation and large language models, and uncertainty quantification. To facilitate learning and education, we provide categorized lists of resources that we found to be useful. We strive to be thorough and unified and hope this initial effort may trigger more community interests and efforts to further advance AI4Science

Compressed Sensing in Multi-Signal Environments.

Technological advances and the ability to build cheap high performance sensors make it possible to deploy tens or even hundreds of sensors to acquire information about a common phenomenon of interest. The increasing number of sensors allows us to acquire ever more detailed information about the underlying scene that was not possible before. This, however, directly translates to increasing amounts of data that needs to be acquired, transmitted, and processed. The amount of data can be overwhelming, especially in applications that involve high-resolution signals such as images or videos. Compressed sensing (CS) is a novel acquisition and reconstruction scheme that is particularly useful in scenarios when high resolution signals are difficult or expensive to encode. When applying CS in a multi-signal scenario, there are several aspects that need to be considered such as the sensing matrix, the joint signal model, and the reconstruction algorithm. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a complete treatment of these aspects in various multi-signal environments. Specific applications include video, multi-view imaging, and structural health monitoring systems. For each application, we propose a novel joint signal model that accurately captures the joint signal structure, and we tailor the reconstruction algorithm to each signal model to successfully recover the signals of interest.PHDElectrical Engineering: SystemsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98007/1/jaeypark_1.pd