Semantic Segmentation on Medium-Resolution Satellite Images using Deep Convolutional Networks with Remote Sensing Derived Indices

Semantic Segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision and remote sensing imagery. Many applications, such as urban planning, change detection, and environmental monitoring, require the accurate segmentation; hence, most segmentation tasks are performed by humans. Currently, with the growth of Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN), there are many works aiming to find the best network architecture fitting for this task. However, all of the studies are based on very-high resolution satellite images, and surprisingly; none of them are implemented on medium resolution satellite images. Moreover, no research has applied geoinformatics knowledge. Therefore, we purpose to compare the semantic segmentation models, which are FCN, SegNet, and GSN using medium resolution images from Landsat-8 satellite. In addition, we propose a modified SegNet model that can be used with remote sensing derived indices. The results show that the model that achieves the highest accuracy RGB bands of medium resolution aerial imagery is SegNet. The overall accuracy of the model increases when includes Near Infrared (NIR) and Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) band. The results showed that our proposed method (our modified SegNet model, named RGB-IR-IDX-MSN method) outperforms all of the baselines in terms of mean F1 scores.