HED-UNet: Combined Segmentation and Edge Detection for Monitoring the Antarctic Coastline
Konrad Heidler, Lichao Mou, Celia A. Baumhoer, A.J. Dietz, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Abstract
Deep learning-based coastline detection algorithms have begun to outshine traditional statistical methods in recent years. However, they are usually trained only as single-purpose models to either segment land and water or delineate the coastline. In contrast to this, a human annotator will usually keep a mental map of both segmentation and delineation when performing manual coastline detection. To take into account this task duality, we, therefore, devise a new model to unite these two approaches in a deep learning model. By taking inspiration from the main building blocks of a semantic segmentation framework (UNet) and an edge detection framework (HED), both tasks are combined in a natural way. Training is made efficient by employing deep supervision on side predictions at multiple resolutions. Finally, a hierarchical attention mechanism is introduced to adaptively merge these multiscale predictions into the final model output. The advantages of this approach over other traditional and deep learning-based methods for coastline detection are demonstrated on a data set of Sentinel-1 imagery covering parts of the Antarctic coast, where coastline detection is notoriously difficult. An implementation of our method is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/khdlr/HED-UNet</uri> .