Dense semantic labeling with atrous spatial pyramid pooling and decoder for high-resolution remote sensing imagery

Abstract

Dense semantic labeling is significant in high-resolution remote sensing imagery research and it has been widely used in land-use analysis and environment protection. With the recent success of fully convolutional networks (FCN), various types of network architectures have largely improved performance. Among them, atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and encoder-decoder are two successful ones. The former structure is able to extract multi-scale contextual information and multiple effective field-of-view, while the latter structure can recover the spatial information to obtain sharper object boundaries. In this study, we propose a more efficient fully convolutional network by combining the advantages from both structures. Our model utilizes the deep residual network (ResNet) followed by ASPP as the encoder and combines two scales of high-level features with corresponding low-level features as the decoder at the upsampling stage. We further develop a multi-scale loss function to enhance the learning procedure. In the postprocessing, a novel superpixel-based dense conditional random field is employed to refine the predictions. We evaluate the proposed method on the Potsdam and Vaihingen datasets and the experimental results demonstrate that our method performs better than other machine learning or deep learning methods. Compared with the state-of-the-art DeepLab_v3+ our model gains 0.4% and 0.6% improvements in overall accuracy on these two datasets respectively.