Irregular adaptive refinement network for semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images

Abstract

The semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images has broad application prospects in land cover classification, road extraction, urban planning and other fields. To alleviate the influence of the large data volume and complex background of high-resolution remote sensing images, the usual approach is to downsample them or cut them into small pieces for separate processing. Even if combining the two methods can improve the segmentation efficiency, it ignores the differences between the middle and the edge regions. Therefore, we consider the characteristics of large and irregular region in high-resolution remote sensing images, and then propose an irregular adaptive refinement network to locate the irregular edge region, which will be refined adaptively. Specifically, on the basis of effectively preserving the global and local information, the prediction confidence is calculated to locate pixel points that are poorly segmented, so as to form irregular regions requiring further refinement, avoiding to ‘over-refine’ intermediate region with good segmentation. At the same time, considering the difference in the refinement degree of different pixels, we propose to adaptively integrate the local segmentation results to refine the coarse segmentation results. In addition, in order to bridge the gap between the two extreme ends of the scale space, we introduce a multi-scale framework. Finally, we conducted experiments on the Deepglobe dataset showing that the proposed method performed 0.37% to 0.87% better than the previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of mean Intersection over Union (mIoU).