DSA: Discriminative Scatter Analysis for Early Smoke Segmentation

Early smoke segmentation (ESS) plays a crucial role in accurately locating the source of smoke, facilitating prompt fire rescue operations and gas leak detection. Unlike regular objects, which are typically rigid, opaque, and have clear boundaries, ESS presents challenges due to the large areas of high transparency in early smoke. This leads to a significant similarity between smoke features and the surrounding background features. The key solution is to obtain a discriminative embedding space. Some distance-based methods have pursued this goal by using specific loss functions (e.g., pair-based Triplet loss and proxy-based NCA loss) to constrain the feature extractor. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called discriminative scatter analysis (DSA). Instead of solely measuring Euclidean distance, DSA assesses the compactness and separation of the embedding space from a sample scatter perspective. DSA is performed on both pixel-proxy scatter (IOS) and proxy-proxy scatter (OOS), and a unified loss function is designed to optimize the feature extractor. DSA can be easily integrated with regular segmentation methods. It is applied only during training and without incurring any additional computational cost during inference. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that DSA can consistently improve the performance of various models in ESS.