Generating Hard Examples for Pixel-Wise Classification

Pixel-wise classification in remote sensing identifies entities in large-scale satellite-based images at the pixel level. Few fully annotated large-scale datasets for pixel-wise classification exist due to the challenges of annotating individual pixels. Training data scarcity inevitably ensues from the annotation challenge, leading to overfitting classifiers and degraded classification performance. The lack of annotated pixels also necessarily results in few hard examples of various entities critical for generating a robust classification hyperplane. To overcome the problem of the data scarcity and lack of hard examples in training, we introduce a two-step hard example generation (HEG) approach that first generates hard example candidates and then mines actual hard examples. In the first step, a generator that creates hard example candidates is learned via the adversarial learning framework by fooling a discriminator and a pixel-wise classification model at the same time. In the second step, mining is performed to build a fixed number of hard examples from a large pool of real and artificially generated examples. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed HEG approach, we design a nine-layer fully convolutional network suitable for pixel-wise classification. Experiments show that using generated hard examples from the proposed HEG approach improves the pixel-wise classification model’s accuracy on red tide detection and hyperspectral image classification tasks.