Multi-class segmentation under severe class imbalance: A case study in roof damage assessment

The task of roof damage classification and segmentation from overhead imagery presents unique challenges. In this work we choose to address the challenge posed due to strong class imbalance. We propose four distinct techniques that aim at mitigating this problem. Through a new scheme that feeds the data to the network by oversampling the minority classes, and three other network architectural improvements, we manage to boost the macro-averaged F1-score of a model by 39.9 percentage points, thus achieving improved segmentation performance, especially on the minority classes.

FireNet: Real-time Segmentation of Fire Perimeter from Aerial Video

In this paper, we share our approach to real-time segmentation of fire perimeter from aerial full-motion infrared video. We start by describing the problem from a humanitarian aid and disaster response perspective. Specifically, we explain the importance of the problem, how it is currently resolved, and how our machine learning approach improves it. To test our models we annotate a large-scale dataset of 400,000 frames with guidance from domain experts. Finally, we share our approach currently deployed in production with inference speed of 20 frames per second and an accuracy of 92 (F1 Score).