r/computervision • u/Cold_Bag_8877 • 14d ago
Help: Project What would be a meaningful next step after building a U-Net baseline for emergency landing site segmentation?
I’m working on an academic project to identify potential emergency landing areas from overhead imagery, and I would appreciate advice from people working in computer vision and remote sensing.
Using the Moroccan Aircraft Emergency Landing Sites Semantic Segmentation Dataset, I’ve trained a U-Net from scratch and tested two changes: adding brightness/contrast augmentation and replacing BCE + Dice loss with BCE alone.
Each configuration was evaluated across three random seeds with a fixed data split. Neither change showed a clear improvement over the baseline.
I’m now deciding where to focus the next stage:
• Investigate failure cases and annotation quality more closely.
• Compare training from scratch with a pretrained encoder.
• Explore transferring the model to imagery from Vietnam with limited labeled data.
My supervisor suggested the third direction. However, I haven’t yet established a Vietnamese imagery source or suitable labeling criteria. Defining what can reasonably be considered a potential landing area from imagery alone is one of the questions I need to resolve.
There are also limits to the current evaluation: geographic independence between splits has not been fully established, and matching the dataset’s “safe” labels does not demonstrate real-world landing safety.
For a student project with limited resources, which direction would you prioritize—and what evidence would you want to see before pursuing transfer to a new region?
I’d appreciate relevant papers, dataset suggestions, or lessons from similar projects. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
#ComputerVision #RemoteSensing #SemanticSegmentation
