Srikumar Sastry

I am a PhD candidate at Washington University in Imaging Science, working in Multimodal Vision Research Laboratory led by Dr. Nathan Jacobs.

I have an MS in Geoinformatics from The Faculty ITC, Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation. During my Masters, I was supervised by Dr. Mariana Belgiu and Dr. Raian Vargas Maretto, and worked on developing active learning methods in remote sensing.

Email  /  CV  /  Scholar  /  Github

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Research

I am interested in computer vision, remote sensing and generative/bayesian modeling. My work involves fusing heterogeneous multimodal data for remote sensing applications involving representation learning, satellite image synthesis, species distribution modeling, change detection, and land cover mapping.

PSM: Learning Probabilistic Embeddings for Multi-scale Zero-shot Soundscape Mapping
Subash Khanal, Eric Xing, Srikumar Sastry, Aayush Dhakal, Zhexiao Xiong, Adeel Ahmad, Nathan Jacobs
ACM Multimedia, 2024
project page / github / arXiv

A soundscape is defined by the acoustic environment a person perceives at a location. In this work, we propose a framework for mapping soundscapes across the Earth.

GEOBIND: Binding Text, Image, and Audio through Satellite Images
Aayush Dhakal, Subash Khanal, Srikumar Sastry, Adeel Ahmad, Nathan Jacobs
IGARSS, 2024   (Oral Presentation)
project page / github / arXiv

In this work, we present a deep-learning model, GeoBind, that can infer about multiple modalities, specifically text, image, and audio, from satellite imagery of a location. To do this, we use satellite images as the binding element and contrastively align all other modalities to the satellite image data.

GOMAA-Geo: GOal Modality Agnostic Active Geo-localization
Anindya Sarkar*, Srikumar Sastry*, Aleksis Pirinen, Chonjie Zhang, Nathan Jacobs, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
Preprint, 2024
project page / github / arXiv

We consider the task of active geo-localization (AGL) in which an agent uses a sequence of visual cues observed during aerial navigation to find a target specified through multiple possible modalities.

GeoSynth: Contextually-Aware High-Resolution Satellite Image Synthesis
Srikumar Sastry, Subash Khanal, Aayush Dhakal, Nathan Jacobs
Earthvision (CVPR), 2024
project page / github / arXiv / press

We present GeoSynth, a model for synthesizing satellite images with global style and image-driven layout control. The global style control is via textual prompts or geographic location. These enable the specification of scene semantics or regional appearance respectively, and can be used together.

Sat2Cap: Mapping Fine-Grained Textual Descriptions from Satellite Images
Aayush Dhakal, Adeel Ahmad, Subash Khanal, Srikumar Sastry, Hannah Kerner, Nathan Jacobs
Earthvision (CVPR), 2024   (Oral Presentation, Best Paper Award)
project page / github / arXiv / press

We propose a weakly supervised approach for creating maps using free-form textual descriptions. We refer to this work of creating textual maps as zero-shot mapping.

Vision-Language Pseudo-Labels for Single-Positive Multi-Label Learning
Xin Xing, Zhexiao Zhang, Abby Stylianou, Srikumar Sastry, Liyu Gong, Nathan Jacobs
LIMIT (CVPR), 2024
project page / github / arXiv

We propose a novel model called Vision-Language Pseudo-Labeling (VLPL) which uses a vision-language model to suggest strong positive and negative pseudo-labels.

LD-SDM: Language-Driven Hierarchical Species Distribution Modeling
Srikumar Sastry, Xin Xing, Aayush Dhakal, Subash Khanal, Adeel Ahmad, Nathan Jacobs
Preprint, 2024
arXiv

We focus on the problem of species distribution modeling using global-scale presence-only data. To capture a stronger implicit relationship between species, we encode the taxonomic hierarchy of species using a large language model.

BirdSAT: Cross-View Contrastive Masked Autoencoders for Bird Species Classification and Mapping
Srikumar Sastry, Subash Khanal, Aayush Dhakal, Di Huang, Nathan Jacobs
WACV, 2024
project page / github / arXiv

We propose a metadata-aware self-supervised learning (SSL) framework useful for fine-grained classification and ecological mapping of bird species around the world. Our framework unifies two SSL strategies: Contrastive Learning (CL) and Masked Image Modeling (MIM), while also enriching the embedding space with metadata available with ground-level imagery of birds.

Learning Tri-modal Embeddings for Zero-Shot Soundscape Mapping
Subash Khanal, Srikumar Sastry, Aayush Dhakal, Nathan Jacobs
BMVC, 2023
project page / github / arXiv

We focus on the task of soundscape mapping, which involves predicting the most probable sounds that could be perceived at a particular geographic location. We utilise recent state-of-the-art models to encode geotagged audio, a textual description of the audio, and an overhead image of its capture location using contrastive pre-training.

Task Agnostic Cost Prediction Module for Semantic Labeling in Active Learning
Srikumar Sastry, Nathan Jacobs, Mariana Belgiu, Raian Vargas Maretto
IGARSS, 2023   (Oral Presentation)

We consider the problem of cost effective active learning for semantic segmentation, which aims at reducing the efforts of semantically annotating images.

Miscellanea

Service

Reviewer, NeurIPS 2024
Reviewer, ECCV 2024
Reviewer, ISPRS (VLM For RS) 2024
Reviewer, WACV (CV4EO) 2024

Teaching

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Center for Environment Undergraduate Research Mentor, Summer 2024
Center for Environment Undergraduate Research Mentor, Summer 2023
Graduate Student Instructor, CSE 559A Spring 2023

Awesome Huggingface Demos

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List of my favorite huggingface demos