Image Augmentations in Planetary Science: Implications in Self-Supervised Learning and Weakly-Supervised Segmentation on Mars

Research on the use of augmentations in physically constrained remote sensing scenarios, like the analysis of Martian surface data, is largely unexplored. In this work we present an analysis on how reasonable augmentation strategies can be selected which are class agnostic and respect physical plausibility in supervised and weakly-supervised tasks. Additionally, we present the first results of self-supervised learning on Martian surface data, discuss the importance of physically plausible augmentations in the context of self-supervised learning, specifically contrastive learning, and provide a comprehensive overview of the generalization properties induced by different augmentation strategies with the help of geomorphic maps.