Semantic Segmentation of Clouds Using Multi-Branch Neural Architecture Search

To precisely and reliably analyze the contents of the satellite imagery, recognizing the clouds which are the obstacle to gathering the useful information is essential. In recent times, deep learning yielded satisfactory results in various tasks, so many studies using deep neural networks have been conducted to improve the performance of cloud detection. However, existing methods for cloud detection have the limitation on increasing the performance due to the adopting the network models for semantic image segmentation without modification. To tackle this problem, we introduced the multi-branch neural architecture search to find optimal network structure for cloud detection. Additionally, the proposed method adopts the soft intersection over union (IoU) as loss function to mitigate the disagreement between the loss function and the evaluation metric and uses the various data augmentation methods. The experiments are conducted using the cloud detection dataset acquired by Arirang-3/3A satellite imagery. The experimental results showed that the proposed network which are searched network architecture using cloud dataset is 4% higher than the existing network model which are searched network structure using urban street scenes with regard to the IoU. Also, the experimental results showed that the soft IoU exhibits the best performance on cloud detection among the various loss functions. When comparing the proposed method with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in the field of semantic segmentation, the proposed method showed better performance than the SOTA models with regard to the mean IoU and overall accuracy.