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A top-down approach for semantic segmentation of big remote sensing images

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Abstract

The increasing amount of remote sensing data has opened the door to new challenging research topics. Nowadays, significant efforts are devoted to pixel and object based classification in case of massive data. This paper addresses the problem of semantic segmentation of big remote sensing images. To do this, we proposed a top-down approach based on two main steps. The first step aims to compute features at the object-level. These features constitute the input of a multi-layer feed-forward network to generate a structure for classifying remote sensing objects. The goal of the second step is to use this structure to label every pixel in new images. Several experiments are conducted based on real datasets and results show good classification accuracy of the proposed approach. In addition, the comparison with existing classification techniques proves the effectiveness of the proposed approach especially for big remote sensing data.

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  1. http://kalideos.cnes.fr.

  2. Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales – Distribution Airbus DS.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments which were very helpful to improve the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Wadii Boulila.

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Communicated by: H. Babaie

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Boulila, W. A top-down approach for semantic segmentation of big remote sensing images. Earth Sci Inform 12, 295–306 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-018-00376-7

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