This paper addresses the problem of floods classification and floods aftermath detection utilizing both social media and satellite imagery. Automatic detection of disasters such as floods is still a very challenging task. The focus lies on identifying passable routes or roads during floods. Two novel solutions are presented, which were developed for two corresponding tasks at the MediaEval 2018 benchmarking challenge. The tasks are (i) identification of images providing evidence for road passability and (ii) differentiation and detection of passable and non-passable roads in images from two complementary sources of information. For the first challenge, we mainly rely on object and scene-level features extracted through multiple deep models pre-trained on the ImageNet and Places datasets. The object and scene-level features are then combined using early, late and double fusion techniques. To identify whether or not it is possible for a vehicle to pass a road in satellite images, we rely on Convolutional Neural Networks and a transfer learning-based classification approach. The evaluation of the proposed methods are carried out on the large-scale datasets provided for the benchmark competition. The results demonstrate significant improvement in the performance over the recent state-of-art approaches.
Being able to automatically link social media and satellite imagery holds large opportunities for research, with a potentially considerable impact on society. The possibility of integrating different information sources opens in fact to new scenarios where the wide coverage of satellite imaging can be used as a collector of the fine-grained details provided by the social media. Remote-sensed data and social media data can well complement each other, integrating the wide perspective provided by the satellite view with the information collected locally, being it textual, audio, or visual. Among the possible applications, natural disasters are certainly one of the most interesting scenarios, where global and local perspectives are needed at the same time. In this paper, we present a system called JORD that is able to autonomously collect social media data (including the text analysis in local languages) about technological and environmental disasters, and link it automatically to remote-sensed data. Moreover, in order to ensure the quality of retrieved information, JORD is equipped with a hierarchical filtering mechanism relying on the temporal information and the content analysis of retrieved multimedia data. To show the capabilities of the system, we present a large number of disaster events detected by the system, and we evaluate both the quality of the provided information about the events and the usefulness of JORD from potential users viewpoint, using crowdsourcing. Abstract The theory of many multivariate chemometrical methods is based on the measurement of distances. The Mahalanobis distance (MD), in the original and principal component (PC) space, will be examined and interpreted in relation with the Euclidean distance (ED). Techniques based on the MD and applied in different fields of chemometrics such as in multivariate calibration, pattern recognition and process control are explained and discussed. This working note describes the work of the WISC team on the Multimedia Satellite Task at MediaEval 2017. We describe the runs that our team submitted to both the DIRSM and FDSI subtasks, as well as our evaluations on the development set. Our results demonstrate high accuracy in the detection of flooded areas from user-generated content in social media. In the first subtask consisting of disaster image retrieval from social media, we found that tags defined by users to describe the images are very helpful for achieving high accuracy classification. In the second subtask consisting of detecting flood in satellite images, we found that social media can increase the precision in analyses when combined with satellite images by taking advantage of spatial and temporal overlaps between data sources.   Retinal vessel segmentation is an indispensable step for automatic detection of retinal diseases with fundoscopic images. Though many approaches have been proposed, existing methods tend to miss fine vessels or allow false positives at terminal branches. Let alone under-segmentation, over-segmentation is also problematic when quantitative studies need to measure the precise width of vessels. In this paper, we present a method that generates the precise map of retinal vessels using generative adversarial training. Our methods achieve dice coefficient of 0.829 on DRIVE dataset and 0.834 on STARE dataset which is the state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.