Papers for

disaster response organizations

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Dual-level balancing improves building extraction from satellite images

RBMatch: Dual-Level Class Rebalancing for Semi-Supervised Building Footprint Extraction

Abstract: Accurate building footprint extraction from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is essential for urban planning, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. However, obtaining dense pixel-level annotations is costly, motivating the use of semi-supervised learning (SSL) to leverage unlabeled imagery. In remote sensing, severe foreground--background imbalance poses a particular challenge for self-training, as it can bias pseudo-label generation and the resulting unsupervised optimization toward the majority background class. We show that addressing this imbalance at only one stage is insufficient: balancing pseudo-label selection alone does not prevent background bias from re-emerging during unsupervised loss optimization, a failure mode we term \emph{imbalance leak}. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{RBMatch}, a dual-level class-rebalancing framework that jointly regulates pseudo-label generation and unsupervised optimization. RBMatch combines a supervised learning pathway with a self-training module comprising three components: adaptive class-specific thresholding (ACT) for balanced pseudo-label selection, confidence-aware class-balanced reweighting (CACBR) for mitigating class bias in the unsupervised loss, and distribution alignment (DAL) for matching the predicted unlabeled-data distribution to the labeled-data prior. Experiments on the WHU, INRIA, and Massachusetts building footprint datasets across labeled ratios of 1%--10% show that RBMatch consistently achieves the best building IoU and F1-score among the evaluated methods. The improvement is most pronounced on the highly imbalanced Massachusetts dataset, where RBMatch improves IoU by 1.37 points over the strongest baseline at a 1% labeling ratio and is the only method to outperform the fully supervised baseline across all twelve dataset--ratio settings.

Tue 6 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Extracting buildings accurately from satellite images is hard because there are way more background pixels than building pixels, which confuses computer methods trying to learn from limited labeled examples. The authors propose a method called RBMatch that tackles this problem by balancing the data in two ways during learning: deciding which unlabeled pixels to trust and how to weigh them during training. Their method works better than other approaches on three standard building extraction datasets, especially when very few labeled examples are available. This means their approach could help create better maps from satellite images with less manual labeling.
Open → 2610.07698v1