Title
Improving Semantic Segmentation in Aerial Imagery via Graph Reasoning and Disentangled Learning
Abstract
Semantic segmentation in aerial imagery is still an important, yet challenging task due to the complex characteristics of remote-sensing data. The critical issues consist of: 1) extreme foreground-background imbalance; 2) large intra-class variance; and 3) arbitrary-oriented, dense, and small objects. The above challenges make it unlikely to model the effective global interdependencies of semantic heterogeneous regions. Besides, general semantic segmentation methods suffer from feature ambiguity due to the joint feature learning paradigm, leading to inferior detail information. In this article, we propose an improved semantic segmentation framework to tackle these problems via graph reasoning (GR) and disentangled learning. On the one hand, a simple, yet effective GR unit is introduced to implement coordinate-interaction space mapping and perform relation reasoning over the graph. It can be deployed on the feature pyramid network (FPN) to exploit cross-stage multi-scale information. On the other hand, we propose a so- called disentangled learning paradigm to explicitly model the foreground and boundary objects, instantiated as foreground prior estimation (FPE) and boundary alignment (BA). The indication of the intermediate feature can be effectively emphasized to enhance the discriminative abilities of the network. Extensive experiments over iSAID, ISPRS Vaihingen, and the general Cityscapes datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework over other state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TGRS.2021.3121471
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Semantics, Cognition, Image segmentation, Feature extraction, Context modeling, Remote sensing, Task analysis, Aerial imagery, disentangled learning, feature alignment, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), semantic segmentation
Journal
60
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0196-2892
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ruigang Niu101.01
Xian Sun208.45
Yu Tian34919.62
Wenhui Diao404.73
Yingchao Feng510.69
Kun Fu641457.81