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In recent years, deep learning has achieved tremendous success in image segmentation for computer vision applications. The performance of these models heavily relies on the availability of large-scale high-quality training labels (e.g., PASCAL VOC 2012). Unfortunately, such large-scale high-quality training data are often unavailable in many real-world spatial or spatiotemporal problems in earth science and remote sensing (e.g., mapping the nationwide river streams for water resource management). Although extensive efforts have been made to reduce the reliance on labeled data (e.g., semi-supervised or unsupervised learning, few-shot learning), the complex nature of geographic data such as spatial heterogeneity still requires sufficient training labels when transferring a pre-trained model from one region to another. On the other hand, it is often much easier to collect lower-quality training labels with imperfect alignment with earth imagery pixels (e.g., through interpreting coarse imagery by non-expert volunteers). However, directly training a deep neural network on imperfect labels with geometric annotation errors could significantly impact model performance. Existing research that overcomes imperfect training labels either focuses on errors in label class semantics or characterizes label location errors at the pixel level. These methods do not fully incorporate the geometric properties of label location errors in the vector representation. To fill the gap, this article proposes a weakly supervised learning framework to simultaneously update deep learning model parameters and infer hidden true vector label locations. Specifically, we model label location errors in the vector representation to partially reserve geometric properties (e.g., spatial contiguity within line segments). Evaluations on real-world datasets in the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) refinement application illustrate that the proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in classification accuracy.
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Quantifying and Reducing Registration Uncertainty of Spatial Vector Labels on Earth Imagery
Given raster imagery features and imperfect vector training labels with registration uncertainty, this paper studies a deep learning framework that can quantify and reduce the registration uncertainty of training labels as well as train neural network parameters simultaneously. The problem is important in broad applications such as streamline classification on Earth imagery or tissue segmentation on medical imagery, whereby annotating precise vector labels is expensive and time-consuming. However, the problem is challenging due to the gap between the vector representation of class labels and the raster representation of image features and the need for training neural networks with uncertain label locations. Existing research on uncertain training labels often focuses on uncertainty in label class semantics or characterizes label registration uncertainty at the pixel level (not contiguous vectors). To fill the gap, this paper proposes a novel learning framework that explicitly quantifies vector labels' registration uncertainty. We propose a registration-uncertainty-aware loss function and design an iterative uncertainty reduction algorithm by re-estimating the posterior of true vector label locations distribution based on a Gaussian process. Evaluations on real-world datasets in National Hydrography Dataset refinement show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms several baselines in the registration uncertainty estimations performance and classification performance.
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- PAR ID:
- 10437010
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 554 to 564
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3534678.3539410
