Unsupervised Learning for Target Tracking and Background Subtraction in Satellite Imagery

Abstract: This paper describes an unsupervised machine learning methodology capable of target tracking and background suppression via a novel dual-model approach. Jekyll produces a video bit-mask describing an estimate of the locations of moving objects, and Hyde outputs a pseudo-background frame to subtract from the original input image sequence. These models were trained with a custom-modified version of Cross Entropy Loss. Simulated data were used to compare the performance of Jekyll and Hyde against a more traditional supervised Machine Learning approach. The results from these comparisons show that the unsupervised methods developed are competitive in output quality with supervised techniques, without the associated cost of acquiring labeled training data.