{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-contrastive-method-based-on-elevation-data","title":"Enhancing Self-Supervised Learning for Remote Sensing with Elevation Data: A Case Study with Scarce And High Level Semantic Labels","arxiv_id":"2304.06857","date":"2023-04-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Omar A. Castaño-Idarraga","Raul Ramos-Pollán","Freddie Kalaitzis"],"abstract":"This work proposes a hybrid unsupervised and supervised learning method to pre-train models applied in Earth observation downstream tasks when only a handful of labels denoting very general semantic concepts are available. We combine a contrastive approach to pre-train models with a pixel-wise regression pre-text task to predict coarse elevation maps, which are commonly available worldwide. We hypothesize that this will allow the model to pre-learn useful representations, as there is generally some correlation between elevation maps and targets in many remote sensing tasks. We assess the performance of our approach on a binary semantic segmentation task and a binary image classification task, both derived from a dataset created for the northwest of Colombia. In both cases, we pre-train our models with 39k unlabeled images, fine-tune them on the downstream tasks with only 80 labeled images, and evaluate them with 2944 labeled images. Our experiments show that our methods, GLCNet+Elevation for segmentation, and SimCLR+Elevation for classification, outperform their counterparts without the pixel-wise regression pre-text task, namely SimCLR and GLCNet, in terms of macro-average F1 Score and Mean Intersection over Union (MIoU). Our study not only encourages the development of pre-training methods that leverage readily available geographical information, such as elevation data, to enhance the performance of self-supervised methods when applied to Earth observation tasks, but also promotes the use of datasets with high-level semantic labels, which are more likely to be updated frequently. Project code can be found in this link \\href{https://github.com/omarcastano/Elevation-Aware-SSL}{https://github.com/omarcastano/Elevation-Aware-SSL}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06857v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.06857v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-contrastive-method-based-on-elevation-data","repo_url":"https://github.com/omarcastano/elevation-aware-ssl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"binary-classification","task_name":"Binary Classification"},{"task_slug":"earth-observation","task_name":"Earth Observation"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"colorjitter","method_name":"ColorJitter"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"feedforward-network","method_name":"Feedforward Network"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"nt-xent","method_name":"NT-Xent"},{"method_slug":"random-gaussian-blur","method_name":"Random Gaussian Blur"},{"method_slug":"random-resized-crop","method_name":"Random Resized Crop"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"simclr","method_name":"SimCLR"},{"method_slug":"test","method_name":"Test"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}