Balanced partitioning of the Galactic plane to segment the Hi-GAL dataset (Molinari et al. 2010; Schisano et al. 2020). The Gp is first divided into a number of areas (squared blocks in the plots). Then a partitioning of the Gp in k subsets is built where each subset gathers blocks that are uniformly distributed along the longitudinal axis (abscissas in the figure). In our experiments, we used blocks of 64 × 64 pixels as areas and many patches (samples) were extracted from every area.