SAN: Scale-Aware Network for Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution Aerial Images

Abstract: High-resolution aerial images have a wide range of applications, such as military exploration, and urban planning. Semantic segmentation is a fundamental method extensively used in the analysis of high-resolution aerial images. However, the ground objects in high-resolution aerial images have the characteristics of inconsistent scales, and this feature usually leads to unexpected predictions. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel scale-aware module (SAM). In SAM, we employ the re-sampling method aimed to make pixels adjust their positions to fit the ground objects with different scales, and it implicitly introduces spatial attention by employing a re-sampling map as the weighted map. As a result, the network with the proposed module named scale-aware network (SANet) has a stronger ability to distinguish the ground objects with inconsistent scale. Other than this, our proposed modules can easily embed in most of the existing network to improve their performance. We evaluate our modules on the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Vaihingen Dataset, and the experimental results and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed module.