Leak-Free Cross-Validated Stacking with Per-Architecture Calibration for Sand-Boil Segmentation in Earthen Levees

Sand boils, points where water seeping beneath an earthen levee re-emerges at the surface, are early warnings of internal erosion, and deep segmentation networks are increasingly used to find them in inspection photographs. Annotated examples are scarce, and two common ways of working around that scarcity quietly inflate reported accuracy: tuning ensemble weights on the same images later used to score them, and training on synthetic images derived from the very photographs held out for testing. We present a sand-boil segmentation framework that closes both loopholes. Every synthetic image carries a pointer to its real parent, and a per-fold filter excludes any image whose parent is held out; five encoder-decoder backbones are trained under five-fold cross-validation, calibrated by one temperature scalar each, and combined by a per-pixel meta-learner fitted only on out-of-fold predictions. On the held-out test set the proposed Updated SandBoilNet reaches an intersection-over-union of 0.707 over three seeds, against 0.608 for the published original re-evaluated on the same split. Under the stacking protocol the calibrated stack reaches 0.681 against 0.694 for the strongest fold-averaged member, so it does not improve on the best single model; eight meta-learner families reproduce that outcome, which we trace to a mean pairwise error correlation of 0.894 among members. A synthetic pool filtered for label fidelity lifts the champion to 0.718 over three seeds against a 0.707 control. We also introduce a mask-conditioned synthesis route that makes the conditioning mask the label by construction, giving labelled training images at zero annotation cost.

Multi-Conditioned Diffusion Synthesis of Sand Boils for Low-Resource Earthen-Levee Inspection

Sand boils on earthen levees are safety-critical defects, but pixel-level detection is limited by scarce annotations. We present a diffusion-based synthesis pipeline for low-resource sand-boil imagery. Using Stable Diffusion XL fine-tuned with DreamBooth and conditioned by a multi-branch ControlNet stack, the pipeline generates synthetic inspection images from a small curated reference set. A soft-mask inpainting protocol preserves the real defect pixels while re-rendering the surrounding scene, avoiding seams and color shifts from prior seamless-cloning compositing. A mask-conditioned ControlNet can also generate a new boil inside a chosen mask, making the mask the segmentation label by construction; however, because large-scale label certification remains unresolved with the available real-trained gate, we release the soft-mask preset as the default. Text conditioning is supplied by a taxonomy-driven Prompt Atlas that expands one domain specification into a stratified, CLIP-validated prompt bank and transfers to new defect classes without code changes. From the real training images, the pipeline produces 1,020 synthetic candidates, of which 815 pass a CLIP admissibility filter. We evaluate image quality using distributional and fidelity-diversity measures against the real reference set and a Poisson baseline, and audit for out-of-distribution drift and memorization. No single preset dominates; each trades off fidelity, diversity, and label reliability. We therefore release the label-reliable preset as the default and treat a curated mixture as the natural augmentation set. Our claims are limited to image quality, label provenance, and diversity; downstream segmentation is left for future work. Code and an artifact manifest are released for reproducibility.