Aerial-BiSeNet:A real-time semantic segmentation network for high resolution aerial imagery

The aircraft system has recently gained its reputation as a reliable and efficient tool for sensing and parsing aerial scenes.However,accurate and fast semantic segmentation of highresolution aerial images for remote sensing applications is still facing three challenges:the requirements for limited processing resources and low-latency operations based on aerial platforms,the balance between high accuracy and real-time efficiency for model performance,and the confusing objects with large intra-class variations and small inter-class differences in high-resolution aerial images.To address these issues,a lightweight and dual-path deep convolutional architecture,namely Aerial Bilateral Segmentation Network(Aerial-Bi Se Net),is proposed to perform realtime segmentation on high-resolution aerial images with favorable accuracy.Specifically,inspired by the receptive field concept in human visual systems,Receptive Field Module(RFM)is proposed to encode rich multi-scale contextual information.Based on channel attention mechanism,two novel modules,called Feature Attention Module(FAM)and Channel Attention based Feature Fusion Module(CAFFM)respectively,are proposed to refine and combine features effectively to boost the model performance.Aerial-Bi Se Net is evaluated on the Potsdam and Vaihingen datasets,where leading performance is reported compared with other state-of-the-art models,in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.