Road segmentation of cross-modal remote sensing images using deep segmentation network and transfer learning

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the road segmentation problem of cross-modal remote sensing images. Design/methodology/approach First, the baseline network based on the U-net is trained under a large-scale dataset of remote sensing imagery. Then, the cross-modal training data are used to fine-tune the first two convolutional layers of the pre-trained network to achieve the adaptation to the local features of the cross-modal data. For the cross-modal data of different band, an autoencoder is designed to achieve data conversion and local feature extraction. Findings The experimental results show the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method. Compared with the ordinary method, the proposed method gets much better metrics. Originality/value The originality is the transfer learning strategy that fine-tunes the low-level layers for the cross-modal data application. The proposed method can achieve satisfied road segmentation with a small amount of cross-modal training data, so that is has a good application value. Still, for the similar application of cross-modal data, the idea provided by this paper is helpful.