Active Learning for Improved Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation in Satellite Images

Shasvat Desai, Debasmita Ghose; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2022, pp. 553-563

Abstract


Remote sensing data is crucial for applications ranging from monitoring forest fires and deforestation to tracking urbanization. Most of these tasks require dense pixel-level annotations for the model to parse visual information from limited labeled data available for these satellite images. Due to the dearth of high-quality labeled training data in this domain, there is a need to focus on semi-supervised techniques. These techniques generate pseudo-labels from a small set of labeled examples which are used to augment the labeled training set. This makes it necessary to have a highly representative and diverse labeled training set. Therefore, we propose to use an active learning-based sampling strategy to select a highly representative set of labeled training data. We demonstrate our proposed method's effectiveness on two existing semantic segmentation datasets containing satellite images: UC Merced Land Use Classification Dataset and DeepGlobe Land Cover Classification Dataset. We report a 27% improvement in mIoU with as little as 2% labeled data using active learning sampling strategies over randomly sampling the small set of labeled training data.

Related Material


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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Desai_2022_WACV, author = {Desai, Shasvat and Ghose, Debasmita}, title = {Active Learning for Improved Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation in Satellite Images}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)}, month = {January}, year = {2022}, pages = {553-563} }