Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Semantic Segmentation Network with Lovász-Softmax Loss Optimization

Abstract

The deep learning technique has already been successfully applied in the field of microwave remote sensing. Especially, convolutional neural networks have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image semantic segmentation. In this paper, a Lovász-softmax loss optimization SAR net (LoSARNet) is proposed which optimizes the semantic segmentation metric intersection over union (IOU) instead of using the traditional cross-entropy loss. Meanwhile, making use of the advantages of the dual-path structure, the network extracts feature through the spatial path (SP) and the context path (CP) to achieve a balance between efficiency and accuracy. Aiming at a polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) image, the proposed network is conducted on the PolSAR datasets for terrain segmentation. Compared to the typical dual-path network, which is the bilateral segmentation network (BiSeNet), the proposed LoSARNet can obtain better mean intersection over union (MIOU). And the proposed network also shows the highest evaluation index and the best performance when compared with several typical networks.

Keywords

• polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• semantic segmentation network
• deep learning
• loss function
• Lovász-softmax loss optimization SAR net (LoSARNet)