Attention-Guided Multi-Scale Segmentation Neural Network for Interactive Extraction of Region Objects from High-Resolution Satellite Imagery

Automatic extraction of region objects from high-resolution satellite imagery presents a great challenge, because there may be very large variations of the objects in terms of their size, texture, shape, and contextual complexity in the image. To handle these issues, we present a novel, deep-learning-based approach to interactively extract non-artificial region objects, such as water bodies, woodland, farmland, etc., from high-resolution satellite imagery. First, our algorithm transforms user-provided positive and negative clicks or scribbles into guidance maps, which consist of a relevance map modified from Euclidean distance maps, two geodesic distance maps (for positive and negative, respectively), and a sampling map. Then, feature maps are extracted by applying a VGG convolutional neural network pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset to the image X, and they are then upsampled to the resolution of X. Image X, guidance maps, and feature maps are integrated as the input tensor. We feed the proposed attention-guided, multi-scale segmentation neural network (AGMSSeg-Net) with the input tensor above to obtain the mask that assigns a binary label to each pixel. After a post-processing operation based on a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF), we extract the selected object boundary from the segmentation result. Experiments were conducted on two typical datasets with diverse region object types from complex scenes. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and our approach outperforms existing methods for interactive image segmentation.