Cross-scale Graph Interaction Network for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Semantic segmentation of remote sensing (RS) images plays a vital role in a variety of fields, including urban planning, natural disaster monitoring, and land resource management. Due to the complexity and low resolution of RS images, many approaches have been proposed to handle the related task. However, these previously developed approaches dedicate to contextual interaction but ignore the cross-scale semantic correlation and multi-scale boundary information. Therefore, we propose a Cross-scale Graph Interaction Network (CGIN) to address semantic segmentation problems of RS images, which consists of a semantic branch and a boundary branch. In the semantic branch, we first apply atrous convolution to extract multi-scale semantic features of RS images. Particularly, based on the multi-scale semantic features, a Cross-scale Graph Interaction (CGI) module is introduced, which establishes cross-scale graph structures and performs adaptive graph reasoning to capture the cross-scale semantic correlation of RS objects. In the boundary branch, we propose a Multi-scale Boundary Feature Extraction (MBFE) module that utilizes atrous convolutions with different dilation rates to extract multi-scale boundary features. Finally, to address the problem of sparse boundary pixels in the fusion process of the two branches, we propose a Multi-scale Similarity-guided Aggregation (MSA) module by calculating the similarity of semantic features and boundary features at the corresponding scale, which can emphasize the boundary information in semantic features. Our proposed CGIN outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in numerical experiments conducted on two benchmark remote sensing datasets.