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Title: PixelDINO: Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Detecting Permafrost Disturbances in the Arctic
Arctic permafrost is facing significant changes due to global climate change. As these regions are largely inaccessible, remote sensing plays a crucial rule in better understanding the underlying processes across the Arctic. In this study, we focus on the remote detection of retrogressive thaw slumps (RTSs), a permafrost disturbance comparable to slow landslides. For such remote sensing tasks, deep learning has become an indispensable tool, but limited labeled training data remains a challenge for training accurate models. We present PixelDINO, a semi-supervised learning approach, to improve model generalization across the Arctic with a limited number of labels. PixelDINO leverages unlabeled data by training the model to define its own segmentation categories (pseudoclasses), promoting consistent structural learning across strong data augmentations. This allows the model to extract structural information from unlabeled data, supplementing the learning from labeled data. PixelDINO surpasses both supervised baselines and existing semi-supervised methods, achieving average intersection-over-union (IoU) of 30.2 and 39.5 on the two evaluation sets, representing significant improvements of 13% and 21%, respectively, over the strongest existing models. This highlights the potential for training robust models that generalize well to regions that were not included in the training data.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2052107 1927872 1927720
PAR ID:
10554717
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Volume:
62
ISSN:
0196-2892
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 12
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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