Deep learning-based object recognition in multispectral satellite imagery for real-time applications

Satellite imagery is changing the way we understand and predict economic activity in the world. Advancements in satellite hardware and low-cost rocket launches have enabled near-real-time, high-resolution images covering the entire Earth. It is too labour-intensive, time-consuming and expensive for human annotators to analyse petabytes of satellite imagery manually. Current computer vision research exploring this problem still lack accuracy and prediction speed, both significantly important metrics for latency-sensitive automatized industrial applications. Here we address both of these challenges by proposing a set of improvements to the object recognition model design, training and complexity regularisation, applicable to a range of neural networks. Furthermore, we propose a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) architecture optimised for accurate and accelerated object recognition in multispectral satellite imagery. We show that our FCN exceeds human-level performance with state-of-the-art 97.67% accuracy over multiple sensors, it is able to generalize across dispersed scenery and outperforms other proposed methods to date. Its computationally light architecture delivers a fivefold improvement in training time and a rapid prediction, essential to real-time applications. To illustrate practical model effectiveness, we analyse it in algorithmic trading environment. Additionally, we publish a proprietary annotated satellite imagery dataset for further development in this research field. Our findings can be readily implemented for other real-time applications too.