Vegetation Land Use/Land Cover Extraction From High-Resolution Satellite Images Based on Adaptive Context Inference

Abstract

In this paper, automatic extraction of multi-context and multi-scale land use/land cover vegetation from high-resolution remote sensing images is tackled, aiming to solve typical challenges in classifying remote sensing images at a pixel level. To solve small inter-class differences and large intra-class differences between the vegetation and background, we introduce a vegetation-feature-sensitive focus perception (FP) module. Considering the intrinsic properties of vegetation objects, we established an adaptive context inference (ACI) model under a supervised setting that includes a context model to represent relationships between a center pixel and its neighbors under semantic constraints, as well as the spatial structures of vegetation features. Comparative experiments on the ZY-3 and Gaofen Image Dataset (GID) datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed automatic vegetation extraction model against the baseline Deeplab v3+ model. Taking precision, kappa coefficient, mean intersection over union (miou), precision rate, and F1-score as the evaluation indexes, the results showed an improvement in the precision by at least 1.44% and miou by 2.47%, over the baseline Deeplab v3+ model. In addition, the ACI module improved the precision and miou by 2% and 3.88%, and the FP module improved the precision and miou by 1.13% and 1.65%. These results and statistics of these comprehensive experiments illustrated that our adaptive and effective vegetation extraction model could satisfy different requirements of land use/land cover mapping applications.

Keywords

• Context inference
• focus perception
• high-resolution remote sensing images
• land use
• land cover
• image segmentation