# Weakly Labeling the Antarctic: The Penguin Colony Case Source: [Weakly Labeling the Antarctic: The Penguin Colony Case]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:35:37.665Z Authors: Hieu Le, Bento Gon\\c{c}alves, Dimitris Samaras, Heather Lynch Published: 2019-05-08T20:03:18.000Z ## Abstract Antarctic penguins are important ecological indicators -- especially in the face of climate change. In this work, we present a deep learning based model for semantic segmentation of Ad\\'elie penguin colonies in high-resolution satellite imagery. To train our segmentation models, we take advantage of the Penguin Colony Dataset: a unique dataset with 2044 georeferenced cropped images from 193 Ad\\'elie penguin colonies in Antarctica. In the face of a scarcity of pixel-level annotation masks, we propose a weakly-supervised framework to effectively learn a segmentation model from weak labels. We use a classification network to filter out data unsuitable for the segmentation network. This segmentation network is trained with a specific loss function, based on the average activation, to effectively learn from the data with the weakly-annotated labels. Our experiments show that adding weakly-annotated training examples significantly improves segmentation performance, increasing the mean Intersection-over-Union from 42.3 to 60.0% on the Penguin Colony Dataset. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()