학술논문

Point Label Aware Superpixels for Multi-Species Segmentation of Underwater Imagery
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 7(3):8291-8298 Jul, 2022
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Image segmentation
Semantics
Training
Distortion
Feature extraction
Biological system modeling
Image color analysis
Environment monitoring and management
semantic scene understanding
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
Monitoring coral reefs using underwater vehicles increases the range of marine surveys and availability of historical ecological data by collecting significant quantities of images. Analysis of this imagery can be automated using a model trained to perform semantic segmentation, however it is too costly and time-consuming to densely label images for training supervised models. In this letter, we leverage photo-quadrat imagery labeled by ecologists with sparse point labels. We propose a point label aware method for propagating labels within superpixel regions to obtain augmented ground truth for training a semantic segmentation model. Our point label aware superpixel method utilizes the sparse point labels, and clusters pixels using learned features to accurately generate single-species segments in cluttered, complex coral images. Our method outperforms prior methods on the UCSD Mosaics dataset by 3.62% for pixel accuracy and 8.35% for mean IoU for the label propagation task, while reducing computation time reported by previous approaches by 76%. We train a DeepLabv3+ architecture and outperform state-of-the-art for semantic segmentation by 2.91% for pixel accuracy and 9.65% for mean IoU on the UCSD Mosaics dataset and by 4.19% for pixel accuracy and 14.32% mean IoU for the Eilat dataset.