Boundary refinement network with semantic embedding connections for UAV aerial image semantic segmentation

Deep-learning-based semantic segmentation is the research focus for unmanned aerospace vehicle (UAV) aerial images analysis. However, there are problems in segmenting small and narrow objects and boundary regions, due to the large size differences between objects and the unbalanced class data in aerial images. A network named SEC-BRNet is proposed for the boundary refinement problem. First, the semantic embedding connections and progressive upsampling decoder are used to obtain spatial details for generating fused feature maps, which are then concatenated in decoding process level by level for recovering the boundary details. Second, a multiloss training strategy is developed for data imbalance and boundary roughness problems, including cross-entropy loss, Dice loss, and active boundary loss. After extensive experiments, our network could achieve 84.8% mIoU and 89.04% Boundary IoU on the AeroScapes dataset and achieve 62.81% mIoU and 90.78% Boundary IoU on the Semantic Drone Dataset. The experimental results indicate that the proposed SEC-BRNet performs well in semantic segmentation task for UAV aerial images.