Impact of Label Types on Training SWIN Models with Overhead Imagery

Understanding the impact of data set design on model training and performance can help alleviate the costs associated with generating remote sensing and overhead labeled data. This work examined the impact of training shifted window transformers using bounding boxes and segmentation labels, where the latter are more expensive to produce. We examined classification tasks by comparing models trained with both target and backgrounds against models trained with only target pixels, extracted by segmentation labels. For object detection models, we compared performance using either label type when training. We found that the models trained on only target pixels do not show performance improvement for classification tasks, appearing to conflate background pixels in the evaluation set with target pixels. For object detection, we found that models trained with either label type showed equivalent performance across testing. We found that bounding boxes appeared to be sufficient for tasks that did not require more complex labels, such as object segmentation. Continuing work to determine consistency of this result across data types and model architectures could potentially result in substantial savings in generating remote sensing data sets for deep learning.