The Performance Improvement of U-Net Model for Landcover Semantic Segmentation through Data Augmentation

Recently, a number of deep-learning based land cover segmentation studies have been introduced. Some studies denoted that the performance of land cover segmentation deteriorated due to insufficient training data. In this study, we verified the improvement of land cover segmentation performance through data augmentation. U-Net was implemented for the segmentation model. And 2020 satellite-derived landcover dataset was utilized for the study data. The pixel accuracies were 0.905 and 0.923 for U-Net trained by original and augmented data respectively. And the mean F1 scores of those models were 0.720 and 0.775 respectively, indicating the better performance of data augmentation. In addition, F1 scores for building, road, paddy field, upland field, forest, and unclassified area class were 0.770, 0.568, 0.433, 0.455, 0.964, and 0.830 for the U-Net trained by original data. It is verified that data augmentation is effective in that the F1 scores of every class were improved to 0.838, 0.660, 0.791, 0.530, 0.969, and 0.860 respectively. Although, we applied data augmentation without considering class balances, we find that data augmentation can mitigate biased segmentation performance caused by data imbalance problems from the comparisons between the performances of two models. It is expected that this study would help to prove the importance and effectiveness of data augmentation in various image processing fields.