Label-free retraining for improved ground plane segmentation

Abstract

Due to increased potential applications of unmanned aerial vehicles over urban areas, algorithms for the safe landing of these devices have become more critical. One way to ensure a safe landing is to locate the ground plane regions of images captured by the device camera that are free of obstacles by deep semantic segmentation networks. In this paper, we study the performance of semantic segmentation networks trained for this purpose at a particular altitude and location. We show that a variation in altitude and location significantly decreases network performance. We then propose an approach to retrain the network using only a new set of images and without marking the ground regions in this novel training set. Our experiments show that we can convert a network’s operating range from low to high altitudes and vice versa by label-free retraining.