LULC Segmentation of RGB Satellite Image Using FCN-8

Abstract: This work presents use of Fully Convolutional Network (FCN-8) for semantic segmentation of high-resolution RGB earth surface satel-lite images into land use land cover (LULC) categories. Specically, we propose a non-overlapping grid-based approach to train a Fully Convo-lutional Network (FCN-8) with vgg-16 weights to segment satellite im-ages into four (forest, built-up, farmland and water) classes. The FCN-8 semantically projects the discriminating features in lower resolution learned by the encoder onto the pixel space in higher resolution to get a dense classi cation. We experimented the proposed system with Gaofen-2 image dataset, that contains 150 images of over 60 di erent cities in china. For comparison, we used available ground-truth along with images segmented using a widely used commeriial GIS software called eCogni-tion. With the proposed non-overlapping grid-based approach, FCN-8 obtains signi cantly improved performance, than the eCognition soft-ware. Our model achieves average accuracy of 91.0% and average Inter-section over Union (IoU) of 0.84. In contrast, eCognitions average accu-racy is 74.0% and IoU is 0.60. This paper also reports a detail analysis of errors occurred at the LULC boundary.