DPPNet: An Efficient and Robust Deep Learning Network for Land Cover Segmentation From High-Resolution Satellite Images

Visual understanding of land cover is an important task in information extraction from high-resolution satellite images, an operation which is often involved in remote sensing applications. Multi-class semantic segmentation of high-resolution satellite images turned out to be an important research topic because of its wide range of real-life applications. Although scientific literature reports several deep learning methods that can provide good results in segmenting remotely sensed images, these are generally computationally expensive. There still exists an open challenge towards developing a robust deep learning model capable of improving performances while requiring less computational complexity. In this article, we propose a new model termed DPPNet (Depth-wise Pyramid Pooling Network), which uses the newly designed Depth-wise Pyramid Pooling (DPP) block and a dense block with multi-dilated depth-wise residual connections. This proposed DPPNet model is evaluated and compared with the benchmark semantic segmentation models on the Land-cover and WHDLD high-resolution Space-borne Sensor (HRS) datasets. The proposed model provides DC, IoU, OA, Ka scores of (88.81%, 78.29%), (76.35%, 60.92%), (87.15%, 81.02%), (77.86%, 72.73%) on the Land-cover and WHDLD HRS datasets respectively. Results show that the proposed DPPNet model provides better performances, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, on these standard benchmark datasets than current state-of-art methods.