Real-time GeoAI for high-resolution mapping and segmentation of arctic permafrost features: the case of ice-wedge polygons

This paper introduces a real-time GeoAI workflow for large-scale image analysis and the segmentation of Arctic permafrost features at a fine-granularity. Very high-resolution (0.5m) commercial imagery is used in this analysis. To achieve real-time prediction, our workflow employs a lightweight, deep learning-based instance segmentation model, SparseInst, which introduces and uses Instance Activation Maps to accurately locate the position of objects within the image scene. Experimental results show that the model can achieve better accuracy of prediction at a much faster inference speed than the popular Mask-RCNN model.