DiverseNet: Decision diversified semi-supervised semantic segmentation networks for remote sensing imagery

Ma, Wanli, Karakus, Oktay ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8009-9319 and Rosin, Paul L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4965-3884 2025. DiverseNet: Decision diversified semi-supervised semantic segmentation networks for remote sensing imagery. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 10.1109/jstars.2025.3574229

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Abstract

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) aims to help reduce the cost of the manual labelling process by leveraging a substantial pool of unlabelled data alongside a limited set of labelled data during the training phase. Since pixel-level manual labelling in large-scale remote sensing imagery is expensive and time-consuming, semi-supervised learning has become a widely used solution to deal with this. However, the majority of existing SSL frameworks, especially various teacher-student frameworks, are too bulky to run efficiently on a GPU with limited memory. There is still a lack of lightweight SSL frameworks and efficient perturbation methods to promote the diversity of training samples and enhance the precision of pseudo labels during training. In order to fill this gap, we proposed a simple, lightweight, and efficient SSL architecture named DiverseHead, which promotes the utilisation of multiple decision heads instead of multiple whole networks. Another limitation of most existing SSL frameworks is the insufficient diversity of pseudo labels, as they rely on the same network architecture and fail to explore different structures for generating pseudo labels. To solve this issue, we propose DiverseModel to explore and analyse different networks in parallel for SSL to increase the diversity of pseudo labels. The two proposed methods, namely DiverseHead and DiverseModel, both achieve competitive semantic segmentation performance in four widely used remote sensing imagery datasets compared to state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods. Meanwhile, the proposed lightweight DiverseHead architecture can be easily applied to various state-of-the-art SSL methods while further improving their performance. The code is available at Here.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode, Start Date: 2025-01-01
Publisher:	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
ISSN:	1939-1404
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	12 June 2025
Last Modified:	12 Jun 2025 16:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/179054

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