Centralized Copy-Paste: Enhanced Data Augmentation Strategy for Wildland Fire Semantic Segmentation

Collecting and annotating images for the purpose of training segmentation models is often cost prohibitive. In the domain of wildland fire science, this challenge is further compounded by the scarcity of reliable public datasets with labeled ground truth. This paper presents the Centralized Copy-Paste Data Augmentation (CCPDA) method, for the purpose of assisting with the training of deep-learning multiclass segmentation models, with special focus on improving segmentation outcomes for the fire-class. CCPDA has three main steps: (i) identify fire clusters in the source image, (ii) apply a centralization technique to focus on the core of the fire area, and (iii) paste the refined fire clusters onto a target image. This method increases dataset diversity while preserving the essential characteristics of the fire class. The effectiveness of this augmentation technique is demonstrated via numerical analysis and comparison against various other augmentation methods using a weighted sum-based multi-objective optimization approach. This approach helps elevate segmentation performance metrics specific to the fire class, which carries significantly more operational significance than other classes (fuel, ash, or background). Numerical performance assessment validates the efficacy of the presented CCPDA method in alleviating the difficulties associated with small, manually labeled training datasets. It also illustrates that CCPDA outperforms other augmentation strategies in the application scenario considered, particularly in improving fire-class segmentation performance.