SELF-TRAINING FOR SEMI-SUPERVISED DEEP CONTOUR DETECTION OF SURFACE WATER

Abstract. Contour detection is better for monitoring dynamic and long-term changes to surface water bodies. For that purpose, we present a semi-automated method for collecting and labeling water contours from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 images. Due to the need for human inspection, the method has thus far generated 14K labeled images from more than 1.5M images. Given the cost of data labeling, we propose a deep semi-supervised self-learning system performed in two training stages, known as teacher-student. The teacher is trained on the accurate human-labeled data, then used to pseudo label the remaining unlabeled data. The student is trained on both human-labeled and machine pseudo-labeled data. For both teacher and student, we use a uniquely designed multiscale UNet classifier that uses fewer parameters and is more accurate than other state-of-the-art classifiers. Random augmentations are used to “noise” the student model and improve its generalization, and normalization schemes are used to blend the human-labeled loss with the machine-labeled loss. Comparisons to existing water body detection classifiers and segmentation classifiers show the superiority of our proposed system in detecting water contours.