Using Satellite Images And Self-supervised Machine Learning Networks To Detect Water Hidden Under Vegetation

In recent years the wide availability of high-resolution radar satellite images along with the advancement of computer vision models have enabled the remote monitoring of the surface area of wetlands. However, these models require large amounts of manually annotated satellite images, which are slow and expensive to produce. To overcome this problem, self-supervised training methods have been deployed to train models without using annotated data. In this paper we use a combination of deep clustering and negative sampling to train a model to segment radar satellite images into areas that separate water from land without the use of any manual annotations. Furthermore, we implement an ensemble version of the model to reduce variance and improve performance. Compared to a single fully-supervised model using the same architecture, our ensemble of self-supervised models achieves a 0.02 improvement in the Intersection Over Union metric over our test dataset.