Variational autoencoders for unsupervised object counting from vhr imagery: applications in dwelling extraction from forcibly displaced people settlement areas

Even though computer vision models are excellent for automatic scene segmentation and object identification from remotely sensed imagery, they demand a huge corpus of annotated data for the training and validation which is a huge challenge in humanitarian emergency response. To tackle this problem, we propose unsupervised dwelling object counting combining Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with an anomaly detection approach. The approach is tested in six Forcibly Displaced People (FDP) settlement areas situated in different parts of the world. Using an anomaly map computed with the VAE model, we demonstrated the possibility of properly locating dwelling objects using anomaly maps. Dwelling counts are obtained by further segmenting anomaly maps. Results show that, though it has strong spatio-temporal variation, the VAE model exhibits promising potential for locating and counting dwellings. It is also observed that in FDP settlements with dense buildings and extremely low contrast between buildings and ground or environment, the performance is relatively lower than the performance achieved in settlement areas with regularly spaced and less complex building structures.