Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2023, Vol. 52 ›› Issue (6): 980-989.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2023.20210684

• Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Improved U-Net remote sensing image semantic segmentation method

HU Gongming1, YANG Chuncheng1,2,3, XU Li1, SHANG Haibin1, WANG Zefan2, QIN Zhilong1   

  1. 1. National Engineering Research Center of Geographic Information System, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430078, China;
    2. Key Laboratory of Geological Survey and Evaluation of Ministry of Education, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China;
    3. School of Geography and Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430078, China
  • Received:2021-12-10 Revised:2022-05-23 Published:2023-07-08
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42171438)

Abstract: Semantic segmentation of remote sensing images by deep neural network is an important content of remote sensing intelligent interpretation, which plays a very important role in urban planning, disaster assessment, agricultural production and other fields. High resolution remote sensing images are characterized by complex background, diverse scales and irregular shape, etc. Therefore, using natural scene semantic segmentation methods to process remote sensing images often has the problem of low segmentation accuracy. Based on the U-Net model, a multi-scale skip connection method is proposed to integrate semantic features of different levels and obtain accurate segmentation boundary and location information. Attention mechanism and pyramid pooling are introduced to solve the problem of fine segmentation in complex background. In order to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, experiments were carried out on the WHDLD and LandCover.ai dataset and compared with the mainstream semantic segmentation methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other comparison methods, with mIoU reaching 74.28% and 82.04% respectively, and with average of F1 score reaching 84.47% and 89.76% respectively; compared with the segmentation results of U-Net, the value of IoU improves significantly in buildings, roads and other categories with a relatively small proportion, and is superior to other comparison methods.

Key words: remote sensing semantic segmentation, U-Net, attention mechanism, multi-scale skip connetion, pyramid pooling

CLC Number: