Aaron Sarna
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A scalable system to measure contrail formation on a per-flight basis
Erica Brand
Sebastian Eastham
Carl Elkin
Thomas Dean
Zebediah Engberg
Ulrike Hager
Joe Ng
Dinesh Sanekommu
Tharun Sankar
Marc Shapiro
Environmental Research Communications (2024)
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In this work we describe a scalable, automated system to determine from satellite data whether a given flight has made a persistent contrail.
The system works by comparing flight segments to contrails detected by a computer vision algorithm running on images from the GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager. We develop a `flight matching' algorithm and use it to label each flight segment as a `match' or `non-match'. We perform this analysis on 1.6 million flight segments and compare these labels to existing contrail prediction methods based on weather forecast data. The result is an analysis of which flights make persistent contrails several orders of magnitude larger than any previous work. We find that current contrail prediction models fail to correctly predict whether we will match a contrail in many cases.
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Contrail Detection on GOES-16 ABI with the OpenContrails Dataset
Joe Ng
Jian Cui
Vincent Rudolf Meijer
Erica Brand
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (2023)
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Contrails (condensation trails) are line-shaped ice clouds caused by aircraft and are a substantial contributor to aviation-induced climate change. Contrail avoidance is potentially an inexpensive way to significantly reduce the climate impact of aviation. An automated contrail detection system is an essential tool to develop and evaluate contrail avoidance systems. In this article, we present a human-labeled dataset named OpenContrails to train and evaluate contrail detection models based on GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) data. We propose and evaluate a contrail detection model that incorporates temporal context for improved detection accuracy. The human labeled dataset and the contrail detection outputs are publicly available on Google Cloud Storage at gs://goes_contrails_dataset .
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Simplified Transfer Learning for Chest X-ray Models using Less Data
Christina Chen
AJ Maschinot
Jenny Huang
Chuck Lau
Sreenivasa Raju Kalidindi
Mozziyar Etemadi
Florencia Garcia-Vicente
David Melnick
Krish Eswaran
Neeral Beladia
Dilip Krishnan
Shravya Ramesh Shetty
Radiology (2022)
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Background: Developing deep learning models for radiology requires large data sets and substantial computational resources. Data set size limitations can be further exacerbated by distribution shifts, such as rapid changes in patient populations and standard of care during the COVID-19 pandemic. A common partial mitigation is transfer learning by pretraining a “generic network” on a large nonmedical data set and then fine-tuning on a task-specific radiology data set. Purpose: To reduce data set size requirements for chest radiography deep learning models by using an advanced machine learning approach (supervised contrastive [SupCon] learning) to generate chest radiography networks. Materials and Methods: SupCon helped generate chest radiography networks from 821 544 chest radiographs from India and the United States. The chest radiography networks were used as a starting point for further machine learning model development for 10 prediction tasks (eg, airspace opacity, fracture, tuberculosis, and COVID-19 outcomes) by using five data sets comprising 684 955 chest radiographs from India, the United States, and China. Three model development setups were tested (linear classifier, nonlinear classifier, and fine-tuning the full network) with different data set sizes from eight to 85. Results: Across a majority of tasks, compared with transfer learning from a nonmedical data set, SupCon reduced label requirements up to 688-fold and improved the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) at matching data set sizes. At the extreme low-data regimen, training small nonlinear models by using only 45 chest radiographs yielded an AUC of 0.95 (noninferior to radiologist performance) in classifying microbiology-confirmed tuberculosis in external validation. At a more moderate data regimen, training small nonlinear models by using only 528 chest radiographs yielded an AUC of 0.75 in predicting severe COVID-19 outcomes. Conclusion: Supervised contrastive learning enabled performance comparable to state-of-the-art deep learning models in multiple clinical tasks by using as few as 45 images and is a promising method for predictive modeling with use of small data sets and for predicting outcomes in shifting patient populations.
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The goal of this project is to learn a 3D shape representation that enables accurate surface reconstruction, compact storage, efficient computation, consistency for similar shapes, generalization across diverse shape categories, and inference from depth camera observations. Towards this end, we introduce Local Deep Implicit Functions (LDIF), a 3D shape representation that decomposes space into a structured set of learned implicit functions. We provide networks that infer the space decomposition and local deep implicit functions from a 3D mesh or posed depth image. During experiments, we find that it provides 10.3 points higher surface reconstruction accuracy (F-Score) than the state-of-the-art (OccNet), while requiring fewer than 1 percent of the network parameters. Experiments on posed depth image completion and generalization to unseen classes show 15.8 and 17.8 point improvements over the state-of-the-art, while producing a structured 3D representation for each input with consistency across diverse shape collections.
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Unsupervised Training for 3D Morphable Model Regression
Kyle Genova
Aaron Maschinot
Daniel Vlasic
The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2018)
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We present a method for training a regression network from image pixels to 3D morphable model coordinates using only unlabeled photographs. The training loss is based on features from a facial recognition network, computed on-the-fly by rendering the predicted faces with a differentiable renderer. To make training from features feasible and avoid network fooling effects, we introduce three objectives: a batch regularization loss that encourages the output distribution to match the distribution of the morphable model, a loopback loss that ensures the regression network can correctly reinterpret its own output, and a multi-view loss that compares the predicted 3D face to the input photograph from multiple viewing angles. We train a regression network using these objectives, a set of unlabeled photographs, and the morphable model itself, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results.
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Synthesizing Normalized Faces from Facial Identity Features
Dilip Krishnan
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2017)
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We present a method for synthesizing a frontal, neutral-expression image of a person's face given an input face photograph. This is achieved by learning to generate facial landmarks and textures from features extracted from a facial-recognition network. Unlike previous approaches, our encoding feature vector is largely invariant to lighting, pose, and facial expression. Exploiting this invariance, we train our decoder network using only frontal, neutral-expression photographs. Since these photographs are well aligned, we can decompose them into a sparse set of landmark points and aligned texture maps. The decoder then predicts landmarks and textures independently and combines them using a differentiable image warping operation. The resulting images can be used for a number of applications, such as analyzing facial attributes, exposure and white balance adjustment, or creating a 3-D avatar.
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