Which Target to Focus on: Class-Perception for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing

Abstract

Deep Learning-based (DL) methods have dominated the task of semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. However, the sizes of different objects vary widely, and there is a great deal of label-noise due to the inevitable shadows. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a method that can precisely handle complex ground data. In this paper, we propose an Inter-Class Enhanced Network (ICEN) for representing features of varying sizes. It comprises two branches: Sparse Representation Network (SPN) and Feature Extraction Network (FEN). Then, a Class-Perception Block is inserted between the two branches to instruct the SPN’s low-level semantic features to be merged into the deeper network. Such a block can reduce label-noise in remote sensing image segmentation. In addition, the proposed EIRI provides a more precise classification process for target edges containing many misclassified points without requiring excessive computational overhead. The experimental results of our proposed Class-Perception Network (C-PNet) achieve competitive performance on the Vaihingen, Potsdam, LoveDA, and UAVid datasets.