Uncertainty Estimation for Deep Learning-Based Segmentation of Roads in Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery

• Main Authors: Jarrod Haas, Bernhard Rabus
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-04-01
• Series: Remote Sensing
• Subjects: machine learning; synthetic aperture radar; uncertainty estimation; deep learning; image segmentation
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/8/1472

Mission-critical applications that rely on deep learning (DL) for automation suffer because DL models struggle to provide reliable indicators of failure. Reliable failure prediction can greatly improve the efficiency of a system, because it becomes easier to predict when human intervention is required. DL-based systems thus stand to benefit greatly from robust measures of uncertainty over model predictions. Monte Carlo dropout (MCD), a Bayesian method, and deep ensembles (DE) have emerged as two of the most popular and competitive ways to perform uncertainty estimation. Although literature exploring the usefulness of these approaches exists in medical imaging, robotics and autonomous driving domains, it is scarce to non-existent for remote sensing, and in particular, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) applications. To close this gap, we have created a deep learning model for road extraction (hereafter referred to as segmentation) in SAR and use it to compare standard model outputs against the aforementioned most popular methods for uncertainty estimation, MCD and DE. We demonstrate that these methods are not effective as an indicator of segmentation quality when measuring uncertainty (as indicated by model softmax outputs) across an entire image but are effective when uncertainty is measured from the set of road predictions only. Furthermore, we show a marked improvement in the correlation between prediction uncertainty and segmentation quality when we increase the set of road predictions by including predictions with lower softmax scores. We demonstrate the efficacy of our application of MCD and DE methods with an experimental design that measures performance in real-world quality assessment using in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) data. These results inform the development of mission-critical deep learning systems in remote sensing. Tasks in medical image analysis that have a similar morphology to road structures, such as blood vessel segmentation, can also benefit from our findings.