Title
Deep Learning From Multiple Crowds: A Case Study of Humanitarian Mapping
Abstract
Satellite images are widely applied in humanitarian mapping that labels buildings, roads, and so on for humanitarian aid and economic development. However, the labeling now is mostly done by volunteers. In this paper, we utilize deep learning to solve humanitarian mapping tasks of a mobile software named MapSwipe. The current deep learning techniques, e.g., convolutional neural network (CNN), can recognize ground objects from satellite images but rely on numerous labels for training for each specific task. We solve this problem by fusing multiple freely accessible crowdsourced geographic data and propose an active learning-based CNN training framework named MC-CNN to deal with the quality issues of the labels extracted from these data, including incompleteness (e.g., some kinds of object are not labeled) and heterogeneity (e.g., different spatial granularities). The method is evaluated with building mapping in South Malawi and road mapping in Guinea with level-18 satellite images provided by Bing Map and volunteered geographic information from OpenStreetMap, MapSwipe, and OsmAnd. The results based on multiple metrics, including Precision, Recall, F1 Score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, show that MC-CNN can fuse the crowdsourced labels for higher prediction performance and be successfully applied in MapSwipe for humanitarian mapping with 85% labor saved and an overall accuracy of 0.86 achieved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/TGRS.2018.2868748
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Satellites,Roads,Machine learning,Training,Buildings,Labeling,Task analysis
F1 score,Computer vision,Active learning,Humanitarian aid,Task analysis,Convolutional neural network,Software,Volunteered geographic information,Artificial intelligence,Deep learning,Mathematics,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
57
3
0196-2892
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
J Chen113930.64
Y. Zhou216337.69
alexander zipf322923.84
Hongchao Fan4378.31