Remote sensing imagery needs to be converted into tangible information which can be utilised in conjunction with other data sets, often within widely used Geographic Information Systems (GIS). As long as pixel sizes remained typically coarser than, or at the best, similar in size to the objects of interest, emphasis was placed on per-pixel analysis, or even sub-pixel analysis for this conversion, but with increasing spatial resolutions alternative paths have been followed, aimed at deriving objects that are made up of several pixels. This paper gives an overview of the development of object based methods, which aim to delineate readily usable objects from imagery while at the same time combining image processing and GIS functionalities in order to utilize spectral and contextual information in an integrative way. The most common approach used for building objects is image segmentation, which dates back to the 1970s. Around the year 2000 GIS and image processing started to grow together rapidly through object based image analysis (OBIA - or GEOBIA for geospatial object based image analysis). In contrast to typical Landsat resolutions, high resolution images support several scales within their images. Through a comprehensive literature review several thousand abstracts have been screened, and more than 820 OBIA-related articles comprising 145 journal papers, 84 book chapters and nearly 600 conference papers, are analysed in detail. It becomes evident that the first years of the OBIA/GEOBIA developments were characterised by the dominance of ‘grey’ literature, but that the number of peer-reviewed journal articles has increased sharply over the last four to five years. The pixel paradigm is beginning to show cracks and the OBIA methods are making considerable progress towards a spatially explicit information extraction workflow, such as is required for spatial planning as well as for many monitoring programmes

The amount of scientific literature on (Geographic) Object-based Image Analysis – GEOBIA has been and still is sharply increasing. These approaches to analysing imagery have antecedents in earlier research on image segmentation and use GIS-like spatial analysis within classification and feature extraction approaches. This article investigates these development and its implications and asks whether or not this is a new paradigm in remote sensing and Geographic Information Science (GIScience). We first discuss several limitations of prevailing per-pixel methods when applied to high resolution images. Then we explore the paradigm concept developed by Kuhn (1962) and discuss whether GEOBIA can be regarded as a paradigm according to this definition. We crystallize core concepts of GEOBIA, including the role of objects, of ontologies and the multiplicity of scales and we discuss how these conceptual developments support important methods in remote sensing such as change detection and accuracy assessment. The ramifications of the different theoretical foundations between the ‘per-pixel paradigm’ and GEOBIA are analysed, as are some of the challenges along this path from pixels, to objects, to geo-intelligence. Based on several paradigm indications as defined by Kuhn and based on an analysis of peer-reviewed scientific literature we conclude that GEOBIA is a new and evolving paradigm.

There is a growing demand for detailed and accurate landslide maps and inventories around the globe, but particularly in hazard-prone regions such as the Himalayas. Most standard mapping methods require expert knowledge, supervision and fieldwork. In this study, we use optical data from the Rapid Eye satellite and topographic factors to analyze the potential of machine learning methods, i.e., artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machines (SVM) and random forest (RF), and different deep-learning convolution neural networks (CNNs) for landslide detection. We use two training zones and one test zone to independently evaluate the performance of different methods in the highly landslide-prone Rasuwa district in Nepal. Twenty different maps are created using ANN, SVM and RF and different CNN instantiations and are compared against the results of extensive fieldwork through a mean intersection-over-union (mIOU) and other common metrics. This accuracy assessment yields the best result of 78.26% mIOU for a small window size CNN, which uses spectral information only. The additional information from a 5 m digital elevation model helps to discriminate between human settlements and landslides but does not improve the overall classification accuracy. CNNs do not automatically outperform ANN, SVM and RF, although this is sometimes claimed. Rather, the performance of CNNs strongly depends on their design, i.e., layer depth, input window sizes and training strategies. Here, we conclude that the CNN method is still in its infancy as most researchers will either use predefined parameters in solutions like Google TensorFlow or will apply different settings in a trial-and-error manner. Nevertheless, deep-learning can improve landslide mapping in the future if the effects of the different designs are better understood, enough training samples exist, and the effects of augmentation strategies to artificially increase the number of existing samples are better understood.

A major challenge in computational chemistry is the generation of novel molecular structures with desirable pharmacological and physiochemical properties. In this work, we investigate the potential use of autoencoder, a deep learning methodology, for de novo molecular design. Various generative autoencoders were used to map molecule structures into a continuous latent space and vice versa and their performance as structure generator was assessed. Our results show that the latent space preserves chemical similarity principle and thus can be used for the generation of analogue structures. Furthermore, the latent space created by autoencoders were searched systematically to generate novel compounds with predicted activity against dopamine receptor type 2 and compounds similar to known active compounds not included in the trainings set were identified.