Full convolutional neural network based on multi-scale feature fusion for the class imbalance remote sensing image classification

Abstract

Remote sensing image segmentation with samples imbalance is always one of the most important issues. Typically, a high-resolution remote sensing image has the characteristics of high spatial resolution and low spectral resolution, complex large-scale land covers, small class differences for some land covers, vague foreground, and imbalanced distribution of samples. However, traditional machine learning algorithms have limitations in deep image feature extraction and dealing with sample imbalance issue. In the paper, we proposed an improved full-convolution neural network, called DeepLab V3+, with loss function based solution of samples imbalance. In addition, we select Sentinel-2 remote sensing images covering the Yuli County, Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China as data sources, then a typical region image dataset is built by data augmentation. The experimental results show that the improved DeepLab V3+ model can not only utilize the spectral information of high-resolution remote sensing images, but also consider its rich spatial information. The classification accuracy of the proposed method on the test dataset reaches 97.97%. The mean Intersection-over-Union reaches 87.74%, and the Kappa coefficient 0.9587. The work provides methodological guidance to sample imbalance correction, and the established data resource can be a reference to further study in the future.