Wei
Tao
Chen,
Master’s
candidate
David
R.
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science
Image semantic segmentation is an important problem in computer vision. However, training a deep neural network for semantic segmentation in supervised learning requires expensive manual labeling. Active learning (AL) addresses this problem by automatically selecting a subset of the dataset to label and iteratively improve the model. This minimizes labeling costs while maximizing performance. Yet, deep active learning for image segmentation has not been systematically studied in the literature.
This thesis offers three contributions. First, we compare six different state-of-the-art querying methods, including uncertainty, Bayesian, and out-of-distribution methods, in the context of active learning for image segmentation. The comparison uses the standard dataset Cityscapes, as well as randomly generated data, and the state-of-the-art image segmentation architecture DeepLab. Our results demonstrate subtle but robust differences between the querying methods, which we analyze and explain. Second, we propose a novel way to query images by counting the number of pixels with acquisition values above a certain threshold. Our counting method outperforms the standard averaging method. Lastly, we demonstrate that the previous two findings remain consistent for both whole images and image crops.