Prototypical Contrastive Network for Imbalanced Aerial Image Segmentation

Keiller Nogueira, Mayara Maezano Faita-Pinheiro, Ana Paula Marques Ramos, Wesley Nunes Gonçalves, José Marcato Junior, Jefersson A. dos Santos; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 8366-8376

Binary segmentation is the main task underpinning several remote sensing applications, which are particularly interested in identifying and monitoring a specific category/object. Although extremely important, such a task has several challenges, including huge intra-class variance for the background and data imbalance. Furthermore, most works tackling this task partially or completely ignore one or both of these challenges and their developments. In this paper, we propose a novel method to perform imbalanced binary segmentation of remote sensing images based on deep networks, prototypes, and contrastive loss. The proposed approach allows the model to focus on learning the foreground class while alleviating the class imbalance problem by allowing it to concentrate on the most difficult background examples. The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for imbalanced binary segmentation of remote sensing images while taking much less training time.