Generative Learning for Postprocessing Semantic Segmentation Predictions: A Lightweight Conditional Generative Adversarial Network Based on Pix2pix to Improve the Extraction of Road Surface Areas | Land Portal

Resource information

Date of publication: 
January 2021
Resource Language: 
ISBN / Resource ID: 
10.3390/land10010079
License of the resource: 
Copyright details: 
© 2021 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article.

Remote sensing experts have been actively using deep neural networks to solve extraction tasks in high-resolution aerial imagery by means of supervised semantic segmentation operations. However, the extraction operation is imperfect, due to the complex nature of geospatial objects, limitations of sensing resolution, or occlusions present in the scenes. In this work, we tackle the challenge of postprocessing semantic segmentation predictions of road surface areas obtained with a state-of-the-art segmentation model and present a technique based on generative learning and image-to-image translations concepts to improve these initial segmentation predictions. The proposed model is a conditional Generative Adversarial Network based on Pix2pix, heavily modified for computational efficiency (92.4% decrease in the number of parameters in the generator network and 61.3% decrease in the discriminator network). The model is trained to learn the distribution of the road network present in official cartography, using a novel dataset containing 6784 tiles of 256 × 256 pixels in size, covering representative areas of Spain. Afterwards, we conduct a metrical comparison using the Intersection over Union (IoU) score (measuring the ratio between the overlap and union areas) on a novel testing set containing 1696 tiles (unseen during training) and observe a maximum increase of 11.6% in the IoU score (from 0.6726 to 0.7515). In the end, we conduct a qualitative comparison to visually assess the effectiveness of the technique and observe great improvements with respect to the initial semantic segmentation predictions.

Authors and Publishers

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s): 

Cira, Calimanut-Ionut
Manso-Callejo, Miguel-Ángel
Alcarria, Ramón
Fernández Pareja, Teresa
Bordel Sánchez, Borja
Serradilla, Francisco

Publisher(s): 

Data provider

Share this page