Context-self contrastive pretraining for crop type semantic segmentation

In this paper we propose a fully-supervised pretraining scheme based on contrastive learning particularly tailored to dense classification tasks. The proposed Context-Self Contrastive Loss (CSCL) learns an embedding space that makes semantic boundaries pop-up by use of a similarity metric between every location in an training sample and its local context. For crop type semantic segmentation from satellite images we find performance at parcel boundaries to be a critical bottleneck and explain how CSCL tackles the underlying cause of that problem, improving the state-of-the-art performance in this task. Additionally, using images from the Sentinel-2 (S2) satellite missions we compile the largest, to our knowledge, dataset of satellite image timeseries densely annotated by crop type and parcel identities, which we make publicly available together with the data generation pipeline. Using that data we find CSCL, even with minimal pretraining, to improve all respective baselines and present a process for semantic segmentation at super-resolution for obtaining crop classes at a more granular level. The proposed method is further validated on the task of semantic segmentation on 2D and 3D volumetric images showing consistent performance improvements upon competitive baselines.