Automation of objects labeling in aerial imagery is a computer vision task with numerous practical applications. Fields like energy exploration require an automated method to process a continuous stream of imagery on a daily basis. In this paper we propose a pipeline to tackle this problem using a stack of convolutional neural networks (U-Net architecture) arranged end-to-end. Each network works as post-processor to the previous one. Our model outperforms current state-of-the-art on two different datasets: Inria Aerial Image Labeling dataset and Massachusetts Buildings dataset each with different characteristics such as spatial resolution, object shapes and scales. Moreover, we experimentally validate computation time savings by processing sub-sampled images and later upsampling pixelwise labeling. These savings come at a negligible degradation in segmentation quality. Though the conducted experiments in this paper cover only aerial imagery, the technique presented is general and can handle other types of images.
A different set of architectures depends on atrous (also called dilated) convolution @cite_28 instead of pooling layers. In atrous convolution filters are "with holes" so that we can enlarge the receptive field of the filter without decreasing the image spatial resolution.
@cite_28
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Abstract Deep networks have set the state-of-the-art in most image analysis tasks by replacing handcrafted features with learned convolution filters within end-to-end trainable architectures. Still, the specifications of a convolutional network are subject to much manual design – the shape and size of the receptive field for convolutional operations is a very sensitive part that has to be tuned for different image analysis applications. 3D fully-convolutional multi-scale architectures with skip-connection that excel at semantic segmentation and landmark localisation have huge memory requirements and rely on large annotated datasets - an important limitation for wider adaptation in medical image analysis. We propose a novel and effective method based on trainable 3D convolution kernels that learns both filter coefficients and spatial filter offsets in a continuous space based on the principle of differentiable image interpolation first introduced for spatial transformer network. A deep network that incorporates this one binary extremely large and inflecting sparse kernel (OBELISK) filter requires fewer trainable parameters and less memory while achieving high quality results compared to fully-convolutional U-Net architectures on two challenging 3D CT multi-organ segmentation tasks. Extensive validation experiments indicate that the performance of sparse deformable convolutions is due to their ability to capture large spatial context with few expressive filter parameters and that network depth is not always necessary to learn complex shape and appearance features. A combination with conventional CNNs further improves the delineation of small organs with large shape variations and the fast inference time using flexible image sampling may offer new potential use cases for deep networks in computer-assisted, image-guided interventions. In this work, we revisit atrous convolution, a powerful tool to explicitly adjust filter's field-of-view as well as control the resolution of feature responses computed by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, in the application of semantic image segmentation. To handle the problem of segmenting objects at multiple scales, we design modules which employ atrous convolution in cascade or in parallel to capture multi-scale context by adopting multiple atrous rates. Furthermore, we propose to augment our previously proposed Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling module, which probes convolutional features at multiple scales, with image-level features encoding global context and further boost performance. We also elaborate on implementation details and share our experience on training our system. The proposed DeepLabv3' system significantly improves over our previous DeepLab versions without DenseCRF post-processing and attains comparable performance with other state-of-art models on the PASCAL VOC 2012 semantic image segmentation benchmark. We propose an unsupervised method for learning multi-stage hierarchies of sparse convolutional features. While sparse coding has become an increasingly popular method for learning visual features, it is most often trained at the patch level. Applying the resulting filters convolutionally results in highly redundant codes because overlapping patches are encoded in isolation. By training convolutionally over large image windows, our method reduces the redudancy between feature vectors at neighboring locations and improves the efficiency of the overall representation. In addition to a linear decoder that reconstructs the image from sparse features, our method trains an efficient feed-forward encoder that predicts quasi-sparse features from the input. While patch-based training rarely produces anything but oriented edge detectors, we show that convolutional training produces highly diverse filters, including center-surround filters, corner detectors, cross detectors, and oriented grating detectors. We show that using these filters in multistage convolutional network architecture improves performance on a number of visual recognition and detection tasks. In this work we address the task of semantic image segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions that are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit. First , we highlight convolution with upsampled filters, or ‘atrous convolution’, as a powerful tool in dense prediction tasks. Atrous convolution allows us to explicitly control the resolution at which feature responses are computed within Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. It also allows us to effectively enlarge the field of view of filters to incorporate larger context without increasing the number of parameters or the amount of computation. Second , we propose atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to robustly segment objects at multiple scales. ASPP probes an incoming convolutional feature layer with filters at multiple sampling rates and effective fields-of-views, thus capturing objects as well as image context at multiple scales. Third , we improve the localization of object boundaries by combining methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models. The commonly deployed combination of max-pooling and downsampling in DCNNs achieves invariance but has a toll on localization accuracy. We overcome this by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF), which is shown both qualitatively and quantitatively to improve localization performance. Our proposed “DeepLab” system sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 79.7 percent mIOU in the test set, and advances the results on three other datasets: PASCAL-Context, PASCAL-Person-Part, and Cityscapes. All of our code is made publicly available online.