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.
In recent years deep learning methods have shown excellent performance in many fields including semantic segmentation. @cite_23 introduced the Fully Connected Networks (FCN) as an end-to-end architecture producing dense output maps. Long also introduced the concept of upsampling using deconvolutional layers. Since object location is very important in semantic segmentation - unlike in classification - new architectures were developed to preserve this location information.
@cite_23
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This paper describes a deep learning approach to semantic segmentation of very high resolution (aerial) images. Deep neural architectures hold the promise of end-to-end learning from raw images, making heuristic feature design obsolete. Over the last decade this idea has seen a revival, and in recent years deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as the method of choice for a range of image interpretation tasks like visual recognition and object detection. Still, standard CNNs do not lend themselves to per-pixel semantic segmentation, mainly because one of their fundamental principles is to gradually aggregate information over larger and larger image regions, making it hard to disentangle contributions from different pixels. Very recently two extensions of the CNN framework have made it possible to trace the semantic information back to a precise pixel position: deconvolutional network layers undo the spatial downsampling, and Fully Convolution Networks (FCNs) modify the fully connected classification layers of the network in such a way that the location of individual activations remains explicit. We design a FCN which takes as input intensity and range data and, with the help of aggressive deconvolution and recycling of early network layers, converts them into a pixelwise classification at full resolution. We discuss design choices and intricacies of such a network, and demonstrate that an ensemble of several networks achieves excellent results on challenging data such as the ISPRS semantic labeling benchmark, using only the raw data as input. Fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been proven very successful for semantic segmentation, but the FCN outputs are unaware of object instances. In this paper, we develop FCNs that are capable of proposing instance-level segment candidates. In contrast to the previous FCN that generates one score map, our FCN is designed to compute a small set of instance-sensitive score maps, each of which is the outcome of a pixel-wise classifier of a relative position to instances. On top of these instance-sensitive score maps, a simple assembling module is able to output instance candidate at each position. In contrast to the recent DeepMask method for segmenting instances, our method does not have any high-dimensional layer related to the mask resolution, but instead exploits image local coherence for estimating instances. We present competitive results of instance segment proposal on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. Fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been proven very successful for semantic segmentation, but the FCN outputs are unaware of object instances. In this paper, we develop FCNs that are capable of proposing instance-level segment candidates. In contrast to the previous FCN that generates one score map, our FCN is designed to compute a small set of instance-sensitive score maps, each of which is the outcome of a pixel-wise classifier of a relative position to instances. On top of these instance-sensitive score maps, a simple assembling module is able to output instance candidate at each position. In contrast to the recent DeepMask method for segmenting instances, our method does not have any high-dimensional layer related to the mask resolution, but instead exploits image local coherence for estimating instances. We present competitive results of instance segment proposal on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. With the development of Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCN), there have been progressive advances in the field of semantic segmentation in recent years. The FCN-based solutions are able to summarize features across training images and generate matching templates for the desired object classes, yet they overlook intra-class difference (ICD) among multiple instances in the same class. In this work, we present a novel fine-to-coarse learning (FCL) procedure, which first guides the network with designed 'finer' sub-class labels, whose decisions are mapped to the original 'coarse' object category through end-to-end learning. A sub-class labeling strategy is designed with unsupervised clustering upon deep convolutional features, and the proposed FCL procedure enables a balance between the fine-scale (i.e. sub-class) and the coarse-scale (i.e. class) knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular datasets, including PASCAL VOC, Context, Person-Part and NYUDepth-v2 to demonstrate the advantage of learning finer sub-classes and the potential to guide the learning of deep networks with unsupervised clustering.