Optimizing Satellite Imagery Datasets for Enhanced Land/Water Segmentation

This paper presents an automated procedure for optimizing datasets used in land/water segmentation tasks with deep learning models. The proposed method employs the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) with a variable threshold to automatically assess the quality of annotations associated with multispectral satellite images. By systematically identifying and excluding low-quality samples, the method enhances dataset quality and improves model performance. Experimental results on two different publicly available datasets-the SWED and SNOWED-demonstrate that deep learning models trained on optimized datasets outperform those trained on baseline datasets, achieving significant improvements in segmentation accuracy, with up to a 10% increase in mean intersection over union, despite a reduced dataset size. Therefore, the presented methodology is a promising scalable solution for improving the quality of datasets for environmental monitoring and other remote sensing applications.