Multispectral Contrastive Learning with Viewmaker Networks

Abstract: Contrastive learning methods have been applied to a range of domains and modalities by training models to identify similar "views" of data points. However, specialized scientific modalities pose a challenge for this paradigm, as identifying good views for each scientific instrument is complex and time-intensive. In this paper, we focus on applying contrastive learning approaches to a variety of remote sensing datasets. We show that Viewmaker networks, a recently proposed method for generating views, are promising for producing views in this setting without requiring extensive domain knowledge and trial and error. We apply Viewmaker to four multispectral imaging problems, each with a different format, finding that Viewmaker can outperform cropping- and reflection-based methods for contrastive learning in every case when evaluated on downstream classification tasks. This provides additional evidence that domain-agnostic methods can empower contrastive learning to scale to real-world scientific domains. Open source code can be found at https://github.com/jbayrooti/divmaker.