Remote Sensing, Vol. 10, Pages 1970: WSF-NET: Weakly Supervised Feature-Fusion Network for Binary Segmentation in Remote Sensing Image (Remote Sensing)

Binary segmentation in remote sensing aims to obtain binary prediction mask classifying each pixel in the given image. Deep learning methods have shown outstanding performance in this task. These existing methods in fully supervised manner need massive high-quality datasets with manual pixel-level annotations. However, the annotations are generally expensive and sometimes unreliable. Recently, using only image-level annotations, weakly supervised methods have proven to be effective in natural imagery, which significantly reduce the dependence on manual fine labeling. In this paper, we review existing methods and propose a novel weakly supervised binary segmentation framework, which is capable of addressing the issue of class imbalance via a balanced binary training strategy. Besides, a weakly supervised feature-fusion network (WSF-Net) is introduced to adapt to the unique characteristics of objects in remote sensing image. The experiments were implemented on two challenging remote sensing datasets: Water dataset and Cloud dataset. Water dataset is acquired by Google Earth with a resolution of 0.5 m, and Cloud dataset is acquired by Gaofen-1 satellite with a resolution of 16 m. The results demonstrate that using only image-level annotations, our method can achieve comparable results to fully supervised methods.