CloudTracks: A Dataset for Localizing Ship Tracks in Satellite Images of Clouds

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chaudhry, Muhammad Ahmed, Kim, Lyna, Irvin, Jeremy, Ido, Yuzu, Chu, Sonia, Isobe, Jared Thomas, Ng, Andrew Y., Watson-Parris, Duncan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chaudhry, Muhammad Ahmed
Kim, Lyna
Irvin, Jeremy
Ido, Yuzu
Chu, Sonia
Isobe, Jared Thomas
Ng, Andrew Y.
Watson-Parris, Duncan
author_facet Chaudhry, Muhammad Ahmed
Kim, Lyna
Irvin, Jeremy
Ido, Yuzu
Chu, Sonia
Isobe, Jared Thomas
Ng, Andrew Y.
Watson-Parris, Duncan
contents Clouds play a significant role in global temperature regulation through their effect on planetary albedo. Anthropogenic emissions of aerosols can alter the albedo of clouds, but the extent of this effect, and its consequent impact on temperature change, remains uncertain. Human-induced clouds caused by ship aerosol emissions, commonly referred to as ship tracks, provide visible manifestations of this effect distinct from adjacent cloud regions and therefore serve as a useful sandbox to study human-induced clouds. However, the lack of large-scale ship track data makes it difficult to deduce their general effects on cloud formation. Towards developing automated approaches to localize ship tracks at scale, we present CloudTracks, a dataset containing 3,560 satellite images labeled with more than 12,000 ship track instance annotations. We train semantic segmentation and instance segmentation model baselines on our dataset and find that our best model substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art for ship track localization (61.29 vs. 48.65 IoU). We also find that the best instance segmentation model is able to identify the number of ship tracks in each image more accurately than the previous state-of-the-art (1.64 vs. 4.99 MAE). However, we identify cases where the best model struggles to accurately localize and count ship tracks, so we believe CloudTracks will stimulate novel machine learning approaches to better detect elongated and overlapping features in satellite images. We release our dataset openly at {zenodo.org/records/10042922}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_14486
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CloudTracks: A Dataset for Localizing Ship Tracks in Satellite Images of Clouds
Chaudhry, Muhammad Ahmed
Kim, Lyna
Irvin, Jeremy
Ido, Yuzu
Chu, Sonia
Isobe, Jared Thomas
Ng, Andrew Y.
Watson-Parris, Duncan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Clouds play a significant role in global temperature regulation through their effect on planetary albedo. Anthropogenic emissions of aerosols can alter the albedo of clouds, but the extent of this effect, and its consequent impact on temperature change, remains uncertain. Human-induced clouds caused by ship aerosol emissions, commonly referred to as ship tracks, provide visible manifestations of this effect distinct from adjacent cloud regions and therefore serve as a useful sandbox to study human-induced clouds. However, the lack of large-scale ship track data makes it difficult to deduce their general effects on cloud formation. Towards developing automated approaches to localize ship tracks at scale, we present CloudTracks, a dataset containing 3,560 satellite images labeled with more than 12,000 ship track instance annotations. We train semantic segmentation and instance segmentation model baselines on our dataset and find that our best model substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art for ship track localization (61.29 vs. 48.65 IoU). We also find that the best instance segmentation model is able to identify the number of ship tracks in each image more accurately than the previous state-of-the-art (1.64 vs. 4.99 MAE). However, we identify cases where the best model struggles to accurately localize and count ship tracks, so we believe CloudTracks will stimulate novel machine learning approaches to better detect elongated and overlapping features in satellite images. We release our dataset openly at {zenodo.org/records/10042922}.
title CloudTracks: A Dataset for Localizing Ship Tracks in Satellite Images of Clouds
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14486