Multi-source Pseudo-label Learning of Semantic Segmentation for the Scene Recognition of Agricultural Mobile Robots
This addresses the problem of tedious manual annotation for agricultural robots in greenhouse environments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods.
The paper tackles training semantic segmentation models for greenhouse scene recognition without manual labels by using multiple public outdoor datasets to generate pseudo-labels, and it shows improved performance over single-source baselines in experiments.
This paper describes a novel method of training a semantic segmentation model for scene recognition of agricultural mobile robots exploiting publicly available datasets of outdoor scenes that are different from the target greenhouse environments. Semantic segmentation models require abundant labels given by tedious manual annotation. A method to work around it is unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) that transfers knowledge from labeled source datasets to unlabeled target datasets. However, the effectiveness of existing methods is not well studied in adaptation between heterogeneous environments, such as urban scenes and greenhouses. In this paper, we propose a method to train a semantic segmentation model for greenhouse images without manually labeled datasets of greenhouse images. The core of our idea is to use multiple rich image datasets of different environments with segmentation labels to generate pseudo-labels for the target images to effectively transfer the knowledge from multiple sources and realize a precise training of semantic segmentation. Along with the pseudo-label generation, we introduce state-of-the-art methods to deal with noise in the pseudo-labels to further improve the performance. We demonstrate in experiments with multiple greenhouse datasets that our proposed method improves the performance compared to the single-source baselines and an existing approach.