GeoCLR: Georeference Contrastive Learning for Efficient Seafloor Image Interpretation
This addresses the problem of costly human annotation in seafloor robotic imaging for marine research, though it is an incremental improvement over existing contrastive learning methods.
The paper tackles efficient seafloor image interpretation by introducing GeoCLR, a self-supervised method that uses georeference information to train CNNs without human input, improving habitat classification accuracy by 10.2% over SimCLR with the same annotations.
This paper describes Georeference Contrastive Learning of visual Representation (GeoCLR) for efficient training of deep-learning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The method leverages georeference information by generating a similar image pair using images taken of nearby locations, and contrasting these with an image pair that is far apart. The underlying assumption is that images gathered within a close distance are more likely to have similar visual appearance, where this can be reasonably satisfied in seafloor robotic imaging applications where image footprints are limited to edge lengths of a few metres and are taken so that they overlap along a vehicle's trajectory, whereas seafloor substrates and habitats have patch sizes that are far larger. A key advantage of this method is that it is self-supervised and does not require any human input for CNN training. The method is computationally efficient, where results can be generated between dives during multi-day AUV missions using computational resources that would be accessible during most oceanic field trials. We apply GeoCLR to habitat classification on a dataset that consists of ~86k images gathered using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). We demonstrate how the latent representations generated by GeoCLR can be used to efficiently guide human annotation efforts, where the semi-supervised framework improves classification accuracy by an average of 10.2% compared to the state-of-the-art SimCLR using the same CNN and equivalent number of human annotations for training.