Anomaly detection for the identification of volcanic unrest in satellite imagery

[Submitted on 28 May 2024]

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Abstract:Satellite images have the potential to detect volcanic deformation prior to eruptions, but while a vast number of images are routinely acquired, only a small percentage contain volcanic deformation events. Manual inspection could miss these anomalies, and an automatic system modelled with supervised learning requires suitably labelled datasets. To tackle these issues, this paper explores the use of unsupervised deep learning on satellite data for the purpose of identifying volcanic deformation as anomalies. Our detector is based on Patch Distribution Modeling (PaDiM), and the detection performance is enhanced with a weighted distance, assigning greater importance to features from deeper layers. Additionally, we propose a preprocessing approach to handle noisy and incomplete data points. The final framework was tested with five volcanoes, which have different deformation characteristics and its performance was compared against the supervised learning method for volcanic deformation detection.