Exploratory Analysis on Pixelwise Image Segmentation Metrics with an Application in Proximal Sensing

A considerable number of metrics can be used to evaluate the performance of machine learning algorithms. While much work is dedicated to the study and improvement of data quality and models’ performance, much less research is focused on the study of these evaluation metrics, their intrinsic relationship, the interplay of the influence among the metrics, the models, the data, and the environments and conditions in which they are to be applied. While some works have been conducted on general machine learning tasks such as classification, fewer efforts have been dedicated to more complex problems such as object detection and image segmentation, in which the evaluation of performance can vary drastically depending on the objectives and domains of application. Working in an agricultural context, specifically on the problem of the automatic detection of plants in proximal sensing images, we studied twelve evaluation metrics that we used to evaluate three image segmentation models recently presented in the literature. After a unified presentation of these metrics, we carried out an exploratory analysis of their relationships using a correlation analysis, a clustering of variables, and two factorial analyses (namely principal component analysis and multiple factorial analysis). We distinguished three groups of highly linked metrics and, through visual inspection of the representative images of each group, identified the aspects of segmentation that each group evaluates. The aim of this exploratory analysis was to provide some clues to practitioners for understanding and choosing the metrics that are most relevant to their agricultural task.