Tokenized Time-Series in Satellite Image Segmentation With Transformer Network for Active Fire Detection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite has been used for the early detection and daily monitoring of active wildfires. How to effectively segment the active fire pixels from VIIRS image time-series in a reliable manner remains a challenge because of the low precision associated with high recall using automatic methods. For active fire detection, multi-criteria thresholding is often applied to both low-resolution and mid-resolution Earth observation images. Deep learning approaches based on Convolutional Neural Networks are also well-studied on mid-resolution images. However, ConvNet-based approaches have poor performance on low-resolution images because of the coarse spatial features. On the other hand, the high temporal resolution of VIIRS images highlights the potential of using sequential models for active fire detection. Transformer networks, a recent deep learning architecture based on self-attention, offer hope as they have shown strong performance on image segmentation and sequential modelling tasks within computer vision. In this research, we propose a Transformer-based solution to segment active fire pixels from the VIIRS time-series. The solution feeds a time-series of tokenized pixels into a Transformer network to identify active fire pixels at each timestamp and achieves a significantly higher F1-Score than prior approaches for active fires within the study areas in California, New Mexico, and Oregon in the US, and in British Columbia and Alberta in Canada, as well as in Australia and Sweden.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".