DCS-TransUperNet: Road Segmentation Network Based on CSwin Transformer with Dual Resolution

Abstract

Recent advances in deep learning have shown remarkable performance in road segmentation from remotely sensed images. However, these methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) cannot obtain long-range dependency and global contextual information because of the intrinsic inductive biases. Motivated by the success of Transformer in computer vision (CV), excellent models based on Transformer are emerging endlessly. However, patches with a fixed scale limit the further improvement of the model performance. To address this problem, a dual-resolution road segmentation network (DCS-TransUperNet) with a features fusion module (FFM) was proposed for road segmentation. Firstly, the encoder of DCS-TransUperNet was designed based on CSwin Transformer, which uses dual subnetwork encoders of different scales to obtain the coarse and fine-grained feature representations. Secondly, a new FFM was constructed to build enhanced feature representation with global dependencies, using different scale features from the subnetwork encoders. Thirdly, a mixed loss function was designed to avoid the local optimum caused by the imbalance between road and background pixels. Experiments using the Massachusetts dataset and DeepGlobe dataset showed that the proposed DCS-TransUperNet could effectively solve the discontinuity problem and preserve the integrity of the road segmentation results, achieving a higher IoU (65.36% on Massachusetts dataset and 56.74% on DeepGlobe) of road segmentation compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The considerable performance also proves the powerful generation ability of our method.