Hyperparameter Optimization for Large-Scale Remote Sensing Image Analysis Tasks: A Case Study Based on Permafrost Landform Detection Using Deep Learning

Climate change pressure on the Arctic permafrost is rising alarmingly, creating a decisive need to produce Pan-Arctic scale permafrost landform and thaw disturbance information from remote sensing (RS) data. Very high spatial resolution (VHSR) satellite images can be utilized to detect ice-wedge polygons (IWPs)– the most important and widespread landform in the Arctic tundra region - across the Arctic without compromising spatial details. Automated analysis of peta-byte scale VHSR imagery covering millions of square kilometers is a computationally challenging task. Traditional semantic segmentation requires the use of task specific feature extraction with conventional classification techniques. Semantic complexity of VHSR images coupled with landscape heterogeneity makes it difficult to use conventional classification approaches to produce Pan-Arctic scale geospatial products. This leads to adapting deep convolutional neural network (DLCNN) approaches that have excelled in computer vision (CV) applications. Transitioning domains from everyday image understanding to remote sensing image analysis is challenging. This study aims to systematically investigate two main obstacles confronted when adapting DLCNNs in large-scale RS image analysis tasks; 1) the limited availability labeled data sets and 2) the prohibitive nature of hyperparameter tunning when designing DLCNNs that can capture the rich characteristics embedded in remotely-sensed images. With a case study on the production of the first pan-Arctic ice-wedge polygon map using thousands of VHSR images, we demonstrate the use of transfer learning and the impact of hyperparameter tuning with a 16% improvement of the Mean Average Precision (mAP50).