SDRNET: Stacked Deep Residual Network for Accurate Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remotely Sensed Images
This addresses the need for better land cover mapping in photogrammetry and remote sensing, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of accurate semantic segmentation of fine-resolution remotely sensed images, which is challenging due to class disparities, occlusion, and object size variation, and presents SDRNet, a stacked deep residual network that achieves competitive performance on ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets.
Land cover maps generated from semantic segmentation of high-resolution remotely sensed images have drawn mucon in the photogrammetry and remote sensing research community. Currently, massive fine-resolution remotely sensed (FRRS) images acquired by improving sensing and imaging technologies become available. However, accurate semantic segmentation of such FRRS images is greatly affected by substantial class disparities, the invisibility of key ground objects due to occlusion, and object size variation. Despite the extraordinary potential in deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) in image feature learning and representation, extracting sufficient features from FRRS images for accurate semantic segmentation is still challenging. These challenges demand the deep learning models to learn robust features and generate sufficient feature descriptors. Specifically, learning multi-contextual features to guarantee adequate coverage of varied object sizes from the ground scene and harnessing global-local contexts to overcome class disparities challenge even profound networks. Deeper networks significantly lose spatial details due to gradual downsampling processes resulting in poor segmentation results and coarse boundaries. This article presents a stacked deep residual network (SDRNet) for semantic segmentation from FRRS images. The proposed framework utilizes two stacked encoder-decoder networks to harness long-range semantics yet preserve spatial information and dilated residual blocks (DRB) between each encoder and decoder network to capture sufficient global dependencies thus improving segmentation performance. Our experimental results obtained using the ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets demonstrate that the SDRNet performs effectively and competitively against current DCNNs in semantic segmentation.