Scale Sensitive Neural Network for Road Segmentation in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Road segmentation in remote sensing images has been widely used in many fields. Semantic segmentation, based on deep learning, has become a hot topic for road segmentation. With the deepening of convolutional neural network (CNN) structures, features in the convolution layer that has more semantic information become more important for road segmentation. However, the spatial resolution of the convolutional layer reduced as the CNN network deepens, which causes the extracted roads to lose some important location information. To solve this problem, this letter proposes a novel end-to-end road segmentation method to effectively utilize the different levels of convolutional layers to enhance the model’s ability to precisely perceive road edges and shapes. The model includes an encoder and a decoder. The encoder encodes the image to obtain the features of different levels and scales. The decoder consists of two modules: scale fusion module and scale sensitive module. In the scale fusion module, features in pooling layers of different scales are fused to obtain a fusion feature. In a scale sensitive module, a weight tensor at the end of the network is learned to evaluate the importance of fusion features. This road segmentation network has been experimentally verified using public data sets, which greatly improves the road segmentation accuracy and achieves good performance.