Developing a multi-filter convolutional neural network for semantic segmentation using high-resolution aerial imagery and LiDAR data

Semantic segmentation of LiDAR and high-resolution aerial imagery is one of the most challenging topics in the remote sensing domain. Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and its derivatives have recently shown the abilities in pixel-wise prediction of remote sensing data. Many existing deep learning methods fuse LiDAR and high-resolution aerial imagery towards an inter-modal mode and thus overlook the intra-modal statistical characteristics. Additionally, the patch-based CNNs could generate the salt-and-pepper artifacts as characterized by isolated and spurious pixels on the object boundaries and patch edges leading to unsatisfied labelling results. This paper presents a semantic segmentation scheme that combines multi-filter CNN and multi-resolution segmentation (MRS). The multi-filter CNN aggregates LiDAR data and high-resolution optical imagery by multi-modal data fusion for semantic labelling, and the MRS is further used to delineate object boundaries for reducing the salt-and-pepper artifacts. The proposed method is validated against two datasets: the ISPRS 2D semantic labelling contest of Potsdam and an area of Guangzhou in China labelled based on existing geodatabases. Various designs of data fusion strategy, CNN architecture and MRS scale are analyzed and discussed. Compared with other classification methods, our method improves the overall accuracies. Experiment results show that our combined method is an efficient solution for the semantic segmentation of LiDAR and high-resolution imagery.