burial-mounds 0.1.3

Recognizing burial mounds with YOLO

burial-mounds-object-recognition

Finetuning Object recognition models to recognize burial mounds.

Usage

This repo was built around using YOLOv8 for detecting objects in satellite images. I chose to organize it as a CLI so that it is easy to get started in completely fresh environments.

Installation

To just use the CLI for preprocessing and finetuning, you can install the package from PyPI.

pip install burial_mounds

Make sure to also install OpenCV on your computer. Here's how you would do that for Debian-based systems (which I have used):

sudo apt update && sudo apt install python3-opencv

Preprocessing

xView

The CLI has code for preprocessing the data in the xView dataset, which contains high quality annotated satellite imagery formulated as an object detection task.

Download the dataset, and arrange it in the following folder structure:

- data/
    - xView/
        - train_images/
            - 10.tiff
            ...
        xView_train.geojson

Then run the command:

python3 -m burial_mounds preprocess_xview --data_dir data/xView

This will convert all labels in the geoJSON file to YOLO format and output a config file for YOLO training under configs/xview.yaml

Burial Mounds

To preprocess the burial mounds dataset, you can also utilise the CLI.

The preprocessing pipeline will split the large geoTIFF files into smaller images with annotations. The script can either prepare data for simple object detection or for OBB training.

The preprocessing consists of the following steps:

1. Splitting the large raster files into smaller windows. (--image_size parameter controls the size of the windows)
2. Minmax color normalization.
3. Producing bounding box labels (either oriented or non-oriented formats, --format parameter)

To prepare the dataset for OBB:

python3 -m burial_mounds preprocess_mounds --data_dir data/TRAP_Data --out_dir data/mounds --image_size 1024 --format obb

For simple object detection:

python3 -m burial_mounds preprocess_mounds --data_dir data/TRAP_Data --out_dir data/mounds --image_size 640 --format detect

Finetuning

There are two types of models you can choose from for finetuning. Either models that have been trained on OBB, or simple object detection.

OBB models have been pretrained on the DOTA satellite object recognition dataset and are therefore more likely to perform better on satellite images without finetuning.

Finetuning the models also comes with data augmentation built-in thereby increasing the robustness of trained models.

Detection

These are the models that you can finetune on a detection task:

Model	Size (pixels)	mAPval 50-95	Speed CPU ONNX (ms)	Speed A100 TensorRT (ms)	Params (M)	FLOPs (B)
YOLOv8n	640	18.4	142.4	1.21	3.5	10.5
YOLOv8s	640	27.7	183.1	1.40	11.4	29.7
YOLOv8m	640	33.6	408.5	2.26	26.2	80.6
YOLOv8l	640	34.9	596.9	2.43	44.1	167.4
YOLOv8x	640	36.3	860.6	3.56	68.7	260.6

These have been pretrained on the Open Images V7 dataset with all sorts of objects the models have to recognize.

You can finetune an already existing model on object detection with the finetune command. If you want to go down this route I recommend that you finetune on xView first, so that the model will have seen satellite images before encountering the mound problem.

python3 -m burial_mounds finetune "yolov8n.pt" "configs/xview.yaml" --epochs 300 --image_size 640

OBB

These are the models that you can finetune on OBB detection:

Model	Size (pixels)	mAPtest 50	Speed CPU ONNX (ms)	Speed A100 TensorRT (ms)	Params (M)	FLOPs (B)
YOLOv8n-obb	1024	78.0	204.77	3.57	3.1	23.3
YOLOv8s-obb	1024	79.5	424.88	4.07	11.4	76.3
YOLOv8m-obb	1024	80.5	763.48	7.61	26.4	208.6
YOLOv8l-obb	1024	80.7	1278.42	11.83	44.5	433.8
YOLOv8x-obb	1024	81.36	1759.10	13.23	69.5	676.7

These models have been pretrained on the DOTA dataset, which contains satellite imagery, and these models are therefore more likely to be better at mound recognition.

python3 -m burial_mounds finetune "yolov8n.pt" "configs/mounds.yaml" --epochs 300 --image_size 1024

To run these finetuning scripts in the background (on Ucloud for instance), I recommend that you use nohup and store the logs.

nohup python3 -m burial_mounds finetune "yolov8n.pt" "configs/mounds.yaml" --epochs 300 --image_size 1024 &> "nano_mounds_finetune.log" &

Publishing

If you intend to publish a trained model to the HuggingFace Hub you can use the push_to_hub command.

python3 -m burial_mounds push_to_hub --model_path "models/mounds_base-yolov8n_best.pt" --repo_id "chcaa/burial-mounds_yolo8n_obb"