Re-identification of objects from aerial photos with hybrid siamese neural networks

In this paper, we consider the task of re-identifying the same object in different photos taken from separate positions and angles during aerial reconnaissance, which is a crucial task for the maintenance and surveillance of critical large-scale infrastructure. To effectively hybridize deep neural networks with available domain expertise for a given scenario, we propose a customized pipeline, wherein a domain-dependent object detector is trained to extract the assets (i.e., sub-components) present on the objects, and a siamese neural network learns to re-identify the objects, exploiting both visual features (i.e., the image crops corresponding to the assets) and the graphs describing the relations among their constituting assets. We describe a real-world application concerning the re-identification of electric poles in the Italian energy grid, showing our pipeline to significantly outperform siamese networks trained from visual information alone. We also provide a series of ablation studies of our framework to underline the effect of including topological asset information in the pipeline, learnable positional embeddings in the graphs, and the effect of different types of graph neural networks on the final accuracy.