Spotting Violence from Space The Detection of Housing Destruction in - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Spotting Violence from Space The Detection of Housing Destruction in - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Spotting Violence from Space The Detection of Housing Destruction in Syria Andr Grger, Jonathan Hersh, Andrea Mantangra, Hannes Mueller, Joan Serrat Trinity College 22. February 2019 Hannes Mueller (Trinity College) Spotting Violence from


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Spotting Violence from Space

The Detection of Housing Destruction in Syria André Gröger, Jonathan Hersh, Andrea Mantangra, Hannes Mueller, Joan Serrat

Trinity College

  • 22. February 2019

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War Reporting

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War Reporting

War reporting is at times highly controversial.

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War Reporting

War reporting is at times highly controversial. Mother of all fake news (Wag the Dog etc.) Important aspects are not agreed upon.

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War Reporting

War reporting is at times highly controversial. Mother of all fake news (Wag the Dog etc.) Important aspects are not agreed upon. Reporting could be driven by politics/spin but also access to an area.

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War Reporting

War reporting is at times highly controversial. Mother of all fake news (Wag the Dog etc.) Important aspects are not agreed upon. Reporting could be driven by politics/spin but also access to an area. It might affect public opinion.

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War Reporting

War reporting is at times highly controversial. Mother of all fake news (Wag the Dog etc.) Important aspects are not agreed upon. Reporting could be driven by politics/spin but also access to an area. It might affect public opinion. It might also affect data gathering.

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This Paper (once it’s done!)

Study of violence in Syrian cities.

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This Paper (once it’s done!)

Study of violence in Syrian cities. 1) Analyze reports on violence using massive news event databases.

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This Paper (once it’s done!)

Study of violence in Syrian cities. 1) Analyze reports on violence using massive news event databases.

reporting function of source/military control

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This Paper (once it’s done!)

Study of violence in Syrian cities. 1) Analyze reports on violence using massive news event databases.

reporting function of source/military control

  • bvious relative holes in reporting

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This Paper (once it’s done!)

Study of violence in Syrian cities. 1) Analyze reports on violence using massive news event databases.

reporting function of source/military control

  • bvious relative holes in reporting

2) Use satellite imagery to measure destruction.

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This Paper (once it’s done!)

Study of violence in Syrian cities. 1) Analyze reports on violence using massive news event databases.

reporting function of source/military control

  • bvious relative holes in reporting

2) Use satellite imagery to measure destruction.

deep learning architecture trained using UNOSAT data

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This Paper (once it’s done!)

Study of violence in Syrian cities. 1) Analyze reports on violence using massive news event databases.

reporting function of source/military control

  • bvious relative holes in reporting

2) Use satellite imagery to measure destruction.

deep learning architecture trained using UNOSAT data trained network then used to "scan" cities repeatedly

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This Paper (once it’s done!)

Study of violence in Syrian cities. 1) Analyze reports on violence using massive news event databases.

reporting function of source/military control

  • bvious relative holes in reporting

2) Use satellite imagery to measure destruction.

deep learning architecture trained using UNOSAT data trained network then used to "scan" cities repeatedly new, "objective" way of building violence panel data

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This Paper (once it’s done!)

Study of violence in Syrian cities. 1) Analyze reports on violence using massive news event databases.

reporting function of source/military control

  • bvious relative holes in reporting

2) Use satellite imagery to measure destruction.

deep learning architecture trained using UNOSAT data trained network then used to "scan" cities repeatedly new, "objective" way of building violence panel data

3) Compare destruction and reports

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Related Literature (Econ.) - Media Bias

Measures: Groseclose and Milyo (2005, QJE), Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010, Econometrica) Political economy of bias: Leeson (2008, JEP), Prat and Stromberg (2013), Lacrinese, Puglisi and Snyder (2011, JPubE) Government reaction to media: Snyder and Strömberg (2010, JPE), Durante and Zhuravskaya (2018, JPE) Effect of mass media on population: DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007, QJE), DellaVigna et al (2014, AEJ:Applied), Yanagizawa-Drott (2014, QJE)

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Related Literature - Violence Data

Thousands of papers based on violence data. Serious investments in data gathering: ACLED, UCDP (GED) In one way or the other all these measures are based on reports on

  • violence. Counts often controversial.

Potential problem: reporting costs are inversely proportional to intensity of conflict.

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Related Literature - Social Science

Old debate in political science (For example, Sambanis (2004, JCR)) Davenport and Ball (2002, JCR), study Guatemalan state terror, compare newspapers and human rights violations reports, identify underreporting of violence by newspapers in rural areas Weidmann (2016, AJPS), compares media-based event and military sources, higher reporting rates of violence in cellphone-covered areas. Price, Gohdes, and Ball (2014, HRDAG), Updated Statistical Analysis

  • f Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic.

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Plan for Alternative Measure

Use satellite imagery to scan for destruction. Based on this construct a panel of violence. Advantages:

Potentially available with frequency of satellite updates (in 2017+ quarterly) Availability is improving dramatically (monthly/weekly). Spatially very disaggregated.

Study reporting news bias in space and time. Caveats:

Destruction is due to a particular subset of violence Satellites are operated, i.e. they might follow news Measurement error is not trivial without human coders

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Related Literature - Remote Sensing

Witmer (2014) Remote Sensing of Violent Conflict: Eyes from Above. Overview. Gueguen and Hamid (2016) Toward a Generalizable Image Representation for Large-Scale Change Detection: Application to Generic Damage Analysis. 86 pairs of pre- and postevent VHR optical satellite imagery covering 4665 km2, patch classifier for 11 different places, balanced test set. 80% TPR, 12% FPR. Kahraman, Imamoglu, and Ates (2016) Disaster Damage Assessment

  • f Buildings Using Adaptive Self-Similarity Descriptor. 2010 Haiti

Earthquake and 2013. balanced test sets, 75/82% TPR and 25/15% FPR. Fujita et al (2017) Damage Detection from Aerial Images via Convolutional Neural Networks: pairs of pre- and post-tsunami image patches, balanced test sets, 94%-96% accuracy, pre not necessary.

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Related Literature - Remote Sensing

Gueguen and Hamid (2016) Toward a Generalizable Image Representation for Large-Scale Change Detection: Application to Generic Damage Analysis.

86 pairs of pre- and postevent VHR optical satellite imagery covering 4665 km2 patch classifier for 11 different places (!) balanced test set stats: 80% true positive rate, 12% false positive rate

Still: UN/Amnesty International use human coders in applications.

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Remainder of Talk

Data Sources Some Evidence on Media Bias Presentation of Method Results

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Data Sources

GDELT and ICEWS: scrape internet/news sources, give CAMEO scale events, give source information

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Data Sources

GDELT and ICEWS: scrape internet/news sources, give CAMEO scale events, give source information ACLED: coded violence events starting January 2017

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Data Sources

GDELT and ICEWS: scrape internet/news sources, give CAMEO scale events, give source information ACLED: coded violence events starting January 2017 Carter Centre: control data for thousands of locations from 2014-2017

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Data Sources

GDELT and ICEWS: scrape internet/news sources, give CAMEO scale events, give source information ACLED: coded violence events starting January 2017 Carter Centre: control data for thousands of locations from 2014-2017 UNOSAT/UNITAR labels for six Syrian cities (up to 4 times)

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Data Sources

GDELT and ICEWS: scrape internet/news sources, give CAMEO scale events, give source information ACLED: coded violence events starting January 2017 Carter Centre: control data for thousands of locations from 2014-2017 UNOSAT/UNITAR labels for six Syrian cities (up to 4 times) Google Earth archive imagery

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Data Sources

GDELT and ICEWS: scrape internet/news sources, give CAMEO scale events, give source information ACLED: coded violence events starting January 2017 Carter Centre: control data for thousands of locations from 2014-2017 UNOSAT/UNITAR labels for six Syrian cities (up to 4 times) Google Earth archive imagery Unit of analysis is currently city but we are working on a match to control points.

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Media Reporting Dataset

News reports from GDELT and ICEWS of fighting (and heavy weaponry)

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Media Reporting Dataset

News reports from GDELT and ICEWS of fighting (and heavy weaponry) Monthly panel of more than 1100 cities 2011-2018

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Media Reporting Dataset

News reports from GDELT and ICEWS of fighting (and heavy weaponry) Monthly panel of more than 1100 cities 2011-2018 Many sources: we coded their country origin (e.g. UK for the Guardian)

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Media Reporting Dataset

News reports from GDELT and ICEWS of fighting (and heavy weaponry) Monthly panel of more than 1100 cities 2011-2018 Many sources: we coded their country origin (e.g. UK for the Guardian) We match this with:

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Media Reporting Dataset

News reports from GDELT and ICEWS of fighting (and heavy weaponry) Monthly panel of more than 1100 cities 2011-2018 Many sources: we coded their country origin (e.g. UK for the Guardian) We match this with:

UNOSAT labels - destruction score

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Media Reporting Dataset

News reports from GDELT and ICEWS of fighting (and heavy weaponry) Monthly panel of more than 1100 cities 2011-2018 Many sources: we coded their country origin (e.g. UK for the Guardian) We match this with:

UNOSAT labels - destruction score Carter centre control: government, isis, opposition, kurds

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Media Reporting Dataset

News reports from GDELT and ICEWS of fighting (and heavy weaponry) Monthly panel of more than 1100 cities 2011-2018 Many sources: we coded their country origin (e.g. UK for the Guardian) We match this with:

UNOSAT labels - destruction score Carter centre control: government, isis, opposition, kurds ACLED fighting events, change of territory

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Media Reporting Dataset

News reports from GDELT and ICEWS of fighting (and heavy weaponry) Monthly panel of more than 1100 cities 2011-2018 Many sources: we coded their country origin (e.g. UK for the Guardian) We match this with:

UNOSAT labels - destruction score Carter centre control: government, isis, opposition, kurds ACLED fighting events, change of territory

Hypothesis: reporting is not consistent and function of control.

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aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs

1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 UNOSAT destruction measure 500000 1000000 1500000 2000000 GDELT fighting measure

aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs aleppo aleppo aleppo aleppo ar-raqqa ar-raqqa ar-raqqa damascus damascus dar'a dar'a dar'a dar'a hamra hamra hamra homs homs

1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 UNOSAT destruction measure 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 ICEWS fighting measure

Comparison of Fighting News Events and Housing Destruction (using UNOSAT labels)

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1 2 3 4 Fighting News Events around Government Taking Control of City (at 0)

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Media Reporting Dataset

Strong deviation between UNOSAT destruction and news reporting

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Media Reporting Dataset

Strong deviation between UNOSAT destruction and news reporting ACLED tries to explicitly tackle reporting bias by cross-verification and through additional sources.

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Media Reporting Dataset

Strong deviation between UNOSAT destruction and news reporting ACLED tries to explicitly tackle reporting bias by cross-verification and through additional sources. We look at relationship between ACLED reports/UNOSAT and news reports on city i, in source j in month t through ln(newsijt) = αjt + θij + β1 ∗ ln(violenceit) +β2 ∗ sourcej ∗ ln(violenceit) + ǫijt

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Media Reporting Dataset

Strong deviation between UNOSAT destruction and news reporting ACLED tries to explicitly tackle reporting bias by cross-verification and through additional sources. We look at relationship between ACLED reports/UNOSAT and news reports on city i, in source j in month t through ln(newsijt) = αjt + θij + β1 ∗ ln(violenceit) +β2 ∗ sourcej ∗ ln(violenceit) + ǫijt The coefficient β2 captures the fact that some sources report less.

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Media Reporting Dataset

Strong deviation between UNOSAT destruction and news reporting ACLED tries to explicitly tackle reporting bias by cross-verification and through additional sources. We look at relationship between ACLED reports/UNOSAT and news reports on city i, in source j in month t through ln(newsijt) = αjt + θij + β1 ∗ ln(violenceit) +β2 ∗ sourcej ∗ ln(violenceit) + ǫijt The coefficient β2 captures the fact that some sources report less. We look at sources from Syria, Russia, US and UK.

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News Reporting in Different Outlets: US and UK media vs. Russian and Syrian media (1) (2) (3) (4) VARIABLES fighting news events heavy fighting news events fighting news events fighting news events ACLED fighting events 0.178*** 0.0865*** (0.0230) (0.0156) ACLED fighting events * (Russian or Syrian news outlet)

  • 0.0848***
  • 0.0527***

(0.0172) (0.0114) ACLED state gains territory 0.609*** (0.0989) ACLED state gains territory * (Russian or Syrian news outlet)

  • 0.316***

(0.0797) ACLED opposition gains territory 0.419*** (0.0920) ACLED opposition gains territory * (Russian or Syrian news outlet)

  • 0.0896*

(0.0495) Source/city Fixed Effects YES YES YES YES Source/time Fixed Effects YES YES NO YES Observations 89,680 89,680 89,680 89,680 R-squared 0.617 0.564 0.617 0.613 Robust standard errors in parentheses. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1. All variables x are in given in ln(x+1). Hannes Mueller (Trinity College) Spotting Violence from Space

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Our Method

Supervised learning

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Our Method

Supervised learning Supervision - show the network 0s and 1s and it learns

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Our Method

Supervised learning Supervision - show the network 0s and 1s and it learns Need a set of 0s and 1s. Two ways we tried:

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Our Method

Supervised learning Supervision - show the network 0s and 1s and it learns Need a set of 0s and 1s. Two ways we tried:

1) mark destruction in images (first alley taken)

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Our Method

Supervised learning Supervision - show the network 0s and 1s and it learns Need a set of 0s and 1s. Two ways we tried:

1) mark destruction in images (first alley taken) 2) UNOSAT/UNITAR labels (currently best)

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Our Method

Supervised learning Supervision - show the network 0s and 1s and it learns Need a set of 0s and 1s. Two ways we tried:

1) mark destruction in images (first alley taken) 2) UNOSAT/UNITAR labels (currently best)

2) Offers no pixel-level labels but a LOT of labels (several thousand)

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∙ destroyed, ∙ severe damage, ∙ moderate

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Neural Network Architecture

We use what is called a convolutional neural network (CNN)

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Neural Network Architecture

We use what is called a convolutional neural network (CNN) Tensorflow gives a lot of options for networks to use.

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Neural Network Architecture

We use what is called a convolutional neural network (CNN) Tensorflow gives a lot of options for networks to use. We use a standard network called VGG16.

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Neural Network Architecture

We use what is called a convolutional neural network (CNN) Tensorflow gives a lot of options for networks to use. We use a standard network called VGG16. 16 because it has 16 layers

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Neural Network Architecture

We use what is called a convolutional neural network (CNN) Tensorflow gives a lot of options for networks to use. We use a standard network called VGG16. 16 because it has 16 layers The first layers are based on many convolutional filters interrupted by max pooling layers.

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Idea of Convolutional Filter

Use small filter (3X3), apply it to the different parts of the image.

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Idea of Convolutional Filter

Use small filter (3X3), apply it to the different parts of the image. This leads to a scoring on the right.

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Idea of Max Pooling

Make local summaries (example: 2X2, stride 2)

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Idea of Max Pooling

Make local summaries (example: 2X2, stride 2) Network ends with fully connected layers (voting on 0 or 1)

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Idea of Max Pooling

Make local summaries (example: 2X2, stride 2) Network ends with fully connected layers (voting on 0 or 1) For a fantastic explanation see Brandon Rohrer’s blog.

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(Modified) Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large‐Scale Image Recognition, K. Simonyan, A. Zisserman

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Method Based on UNOSAT/UNITAR Tags

We do change detection: use before/after images.

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Method Based on UNOSAT/UNITAR Tags

We do change detection: use before/after images. Make a patch around tag (64 X 64) pixels: "positives"

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Method Based on UNOSAT/UNITAR Tags

We do change detection: use before/after images. Make a patch around tag (64 X 64) pixels: "positives"

Take a satellite image from the same place years before.

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Method Based on UNOSAT/UNITAR Tags

We do change detection: use before/after images. Make a patch around tag (64 X 64) pixels: "positives"

Take a satellite image from the same place years before.

Sample "negatives" randomly, far away from positives.

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Method Based on UNOSAT/UNITAR Tags

We do change detection: use before/after images. Make a patch around tag (64 X 64) pixels: "positives"

Take a satellite image from the same place years before.

Sample "negatives" randomly, far away from positives.

Need to restrict sampling to urban area

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Method Based on UNOSAT/UNITAR Tags

We do change detection: use before/after images. Make a patch around tag (64 X 64) pixels: "positives"

Take a satellite image from the same place years before.

Sample "negatives" randomly, far away from positives.

Need to restrict sampling to urban area

This gives us 6 layers to feed into Neural Network.

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Method Based on UNOSAT/UNITAR Tags

We do change detection: use before/after images. Make a patch around tag (64 X 64) pixels: "positives"

Take a satellite image from the same place years before.

Sample "negatives" randomly, far away from positives.

Need to restrict sampling to urban area

This gives us 6 layers to feed into Neural Network. We train and test with 5 folds and sample 20 negatives for one positive.

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All positives and negatives (20 negs/pos)

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All positives and negatives (20 negs/pos)

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Fold 1

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Fold 2

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Project is Now in Second Gear

Instead of using it on pre-defined patches use it to "scan cities"

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Project is Now in Second Gear

Instead of using it on pre-defined patches use it to "scan cities" Goal: use trained classifier to scan unseen places or at least unseen times.

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Project is Now in Second Gear

Instead of using it on pre-defined patches use it to "scan cities" Goal: use trained classifier to scan unseen places or at least unseen times. First problem: image quality, angle and lighting change.

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Project is Now in Second Gear

Instead of using it on pre-defined patches use it to "scan cities" Goal: use trained classifier to scan unseen places or at least unseen times. First problem: image quality, angle and lighting change.

→ Domain transfer is very hard (our holy grail)

Hannes Mueller (Trinity College) Spotting Violence from Space

  • 22. February 2019

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SLIDE 92

Project is Now in Second Gear

Instead of using it on pre-defined patches use it to "scan cities" Goal: use trained classifier to scan unseen places or at least unseen times. First problem: image quality, angle and lighting change.

→ Domain transfer is very hard (our holy grail) Might be the reason why UNOSAT/UNITAR still use hand coding.

Hannes Mueller (Trinity College) Spotting Violence from Space

  • 22. February 2019

25 / 31

slide-93
SLIDE 93

Project is Now in Second Gear

Instead of using it on pre-defined patches use it to "scan cities" Goal: use trained classifier to scan unseen places or at least unseen times. First problem: image quality, angle and lighting change.

→ Domain transfer is very hard (our holy grail) Might be the reason why UNOSAT/UNITAR still use hand coding.

Second problem: imbalance explodes when scanning.

Hannes Mueller (Trinity College) Spotting Violence from Space

  • 22. February 2019

25 / 31

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SLIDE 94

Problem in Applications

Literature is focusing on 1:1 evaluation (TPR = 0.8, FPR = 0.12) We deviate from this on purpose. Reason: reality on the ground is far from 1:1 A LOT more patches contain no destruction. Statistics of 1:1 test are misleading

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  • 22. February 2019

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SLIDE 95

Why is this a problem?

An example: True positive rate (share of 1’s predicted correctly - recall) TPR = TP TP + FN = 80% False positive rate (share of 0’s not predicted correctly) FPR = FP FP + TN = 12% Imagine you have 1 million patches Imagine of these 100 are destroyed

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  • 22. February 2019

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SLIDE 96

Why is this a problem?

12% FPR means your model produces 1Mio ∗ 0.12 FP = 120, 000 FP 80% TPR means your model produces 100 ∗ 0.8 TP = 80 TP The probability that you are right if you find destruction is... 80/120, 000 = 0.06 %!!! This means we need to get false positives (FP) down!

Hannes Mueller (Trinity College) Spotting Violence from Space

  • 22. February 2019

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SLIDE 97
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SLIDE 101

20000 40000 60000 80000 destroyed cells 2013m7 2014m7 2015m7 2016m7 time

Scan Results: 7 X 4 million scanned patches

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SLIDE 102

Domain Transfer Across Cities

Currently: train on one city then use for monitoring. Goal: train on some cities and apply to others. Working on: train on Aleppo, then scan Homs

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  • 22. February 2019

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SLIDE 103

Summary

Clear patterns in reporting. Propose a method based on image. Scanning within city is clearly possible and generates new data. Next step: train on one city test on others If we manage this we can scan more cities.

Hannes Mueller (Trinity College) Spotting Violence from Space

  • 22. February 2019

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