A Dynamic Effective Class Balanced Approach for Remote Sensing Imagery Semantic Segmentation of Imbalanced Data

Abstract

The wide application and rapid development of satellite remote sensing technology have put higher requirements on remote sensing image segmentation methods. Because of its characteristics of large image size, large data volume, and complex segmentation background, not only are the traditional image segmentation methods difficult to apply effectively, but the image segmentation methods based on deep learning are faced with the problem of extremely unbalanced data between categories. In order to solve this problem, first of all, according to the existing effective sample theory, the effective sample calculation method in the context of semantic segmentation is firstly proposed in the highly unbalanced dataset. Then, a dynamic weighting method based on the effective sample concept is proposed, which can be applied to the semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. Finally, the applicability of this method to different loss functions and different network structures is verified on the self-built Landsat8-OLI remote sensing image-based tri-classified forest fire burning area dataset and the LoveDA dataset, which is for land-cover semantic segmentation. It has been concluded that this weighting algorithm can enhance the minimal-class segmentation accuracy while ensuring that the overall segmentation performance in multi-class segmentation tasks is verified in two different semantic segmentation tasks, including the land use and land cover (LULC) and the forest fire burning area segmentation In addition, this proposed method significantly improves the recall of forest fire burning area segmentation by as much as about 30%, which is of great reference value for forest fire research based on remote sensing images.