Class-wise fully convolutional network for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images

Abstract

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in remote sensing image interpretation, which aims to assign a semantic label for every pixel in the given image. Accurate semantic segmentation is still challenging due to the complex distributions of various ground objects. With the development of deep learning, a series of segmentation networks represented by fully convolutional network (FCN) has made remarkable progress on this problem, but the segmentation accuracy is still far from expectations. This paper focuses on the importance of class-specific features of different land cover objects, and presents a novel end-to-end class-wise processing framework for segmentation. The proposed class-wise FCN (C-FCN) is shaped in the form of an encoder-decoder structure with skip-connections, in which the encoder is shared to produce general features for all categories and the decoder is class-wise to process class-specific features. To be detailed, class-wise transition (CT), class-wise up-sampling (CU), class-wise supervision (CS), and class-wise classification (CC) modules are designed to achieve the class-wise transfer, recover the resolution of class-wise feature maps, bridge the encoder and modified decoder, and implement class-wise classifications, respectively. Class-wise and group convolutions are adopted in the architecture with regard to the control of parameter numbers. The method is tested on the public ISPRS 2D semantic labeling benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed C-FCN significantly improves the segmentation performances compared with many state-of-the-art FCN-based networks, revealing its potentials on accurate segmentation of complex remote sensing images.