Lightweight Multi-scale Hierarchical Anomaly Detection and Localization for Geospatial Big Data Applications at the Edge

Abstract

As an increasing number of critical applications, including environmental, emergency, meteorological, and agricultural, rely on real-time anomaly detection in geospatial data streams, challenges related to the storage, processing, and communication of this data arise. Traditionally, large volumes of data have been sent to centralized processing locations for insight extraction. Given the big data context of these applications, this approach becomes increasingly infeasible as data volume and velocity continue to increase. This paper proposes a lightweight edge-oriented approach for anomaly detection and localization for geospatial data streams. By leveraging the H3 discrete global grid system and a multi-scale drill-down logic, the proposed approach significantly reduces computational overhead, achieving a 99.7\% reduction in evaluations compared to traditional flat-scan methods. Furthermore, by filtering out noise-induced flickering anomalies at lower resolutions, spatially-persistent anomalous signals can be efficiently identified. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively distills massive geospatial data into actionable insights.

Accepted at IEEE GLOBECOM 2026