SERNet: Squeeze and Excitation Residual Network for Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

The semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images (HRRSIs) is a basic task for remote sensing image processing and has a wide range of applications. However, the abundant texture information and wide imaging range of HRRSIs lead to the complex distribution of ground objects and unclear boundaries, which bring huge challenges to the segmentation of HRRSIs. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose an improved squeeze and excitation residual network (SERNet), which integrates several squeeze and excitation residual modules (SERMs) and a refine attention module (RAM). The SERM can recalibrate feature responses adaptively by modeling the long-range dependencies in the channel and spatial dimensions, which enables effective information to be transmitted between the shallow and deep layers. The RAM pays attention to global features that are beneficial to segmentation results. Furthermore, the ISPRS datasets were processed to focus on the segmentation of vegetation categories and introduce Digital Surface Model (DSM) images to learn and integrate features to improve the segmentation accuracy of surface vegetation, which has certain prospects in the field of forestry applications. We conduct a set of comparative experiments on ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets. The results verify the superior performance of the proposed SERNet.