DiverseNet: Decision Diversified Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation Networks for Remote Sensing Imagery

Semi-supervised learning is designed to help reduce the cost of the manual labelling process by exploiting the use of useful features from a large quantity of unlabelled data during training. Since pixel-level manual labelling in large-scale remote sensing imagery is expensive, semi-supervised learning becomes an appropriate solution to this. However, most of the existing semi-supervised learning methods still lack efficient perturbation methods to promote diversity of features and the precision of pseudo labels during training. In order to fill this gap, we propose DiverseNet architectures which explore multi-head and multi-model semi-supervised learning algorithms by simultaneously promoting precision and diversity during training. The two proposed methods of DiverseNet, namely the DiverseHead and DiverseModel, achieve the highest semantic segmentation performance in four widely utilised remote sensing imagery data sets compared to state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods. Meanwhile, the proposed DiverseHead architecture is relatively lightweight in terms of parameter space compared to the state-of-the-art methods whilst reaching high-performance results for all the tested data sets.