Xiaolong Lu wins the SwisstopoEDU award 2023!

Xiaolong Lu, who completed his ETH Master thesis at ECEO in the fall semester 2022-2023, has studied ways of cartographing Alpine land cover with deep neural networks. He developed a new network for semantic segmentation based on mixtures of experts, where each expert focuses on predicting common, uncommon and rare classes, respectively. This is necessary due to the imbalance of the dataset, where rare classes occur less than 1% of the time!

He applied the model to the prediction of mountain landcover in the region of Valais and used Swisstopo aerial and reference data data. His results showed an impressive increase of accuracy in the detection of rock classes and are currently being considered at Swisstopo for the update of their topographic landscpe model (SwissTLM).

The SwisstopoEDU award recognizes every year a Master student who works on issues of relevance for Swisstopo.

The work was co-supervised by Devis Tuia and Valerie Zermatten from ECEO and Irena Hajnsek from ETH Zurich.