Semantic Robots is a strategic partnership between the Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems, which MPI is a part of, and several industrial partners, all leaders in their respective fields. This is a 6-year research profile funded by The Knowledge Foundation for a total of 36MSEK, matched by equal contribution from the industry. The main objective of this effort is to further develop our key research areas through close cooperation with leading industrial players.

MPI is a principle investigator of one of three research directions in this project, with the main goal to create methods and tools for discovering semantic knowledge from aerial imagery. The project is comprised of three major parts: image segmentation and classification, discovering semantic knowledge and building ontologies based on classification results and open available data sources, and visualization.

On the first step, we develop algorithms for classification and segmentation of satellite orthoimagery using convolutional neural networks. From multi-band true-ortho satellite imagery covering the range from 400 to 1040nm, along with high detailed digital elevation models (DEM), we produce rapid classification of the area into five classes: vegetation, ground, water, road, building. Although not perfectly precise, the results of classification allows to build reasoning on the data and incorporate other data sources, such as Open Street Map (OSM). The reasoning will in tern allow to improve classification (for instance, to solve confusion in the difficult areas of the map, for example, in shadows).

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