Focusing on the Big Picture: Insights into a Systems Approach to Deep Learning for Satellite Imagery

Deep learning tasks are often complicated and require a variety of components working together efficiently to perform well. Due to the often large scale of these tasks, there is a necessity to iterate quickly in order to attempt a variety of methods and to find and fix bugs. While participating in IARPA's Functional Map of the World challenge, we identified challenges along the entire deep learning pipeline and found various solutions to these challenges. In this paper, we present the performance, engineering, and deep learning considerations with processing and modeling data, as well as underlying infrastructure considerations that support large-scale deep learning tasks. We also discuss insights and observations with regard to satellite imagery and deep learning for image classification.