Satellite Building Segmentation using Deformable Convolution and Knowledge Distillation

변형 가능한 컨볼루션 네트워크와 지식증류 기반 위성 영상 빌딩 분할

Building segmentation using satellite imagery such as EO (Electro-Optical) and SAR (Synthetic-Aperture Radar) images are widely used due to their various uses. EO images have the advantage of having color information, and they are noise-free. In contrast, SAR images can identify the physical characteristics and geometrical information that the EO image cannot capture. This paper proposes a learning framework for efficient building segmentation that consists of a teacher-student-based privileged knowledge distillation and deformable convolution block. The teacher network utilizes EO and SAR images simultaneously to produce richer features and provide them to the student network, while the student network only uses EO images. To do this, we present objective functions that consist of Kullback-Leibler divergence loss and knowledge distillation loss. Furthermore, we introduce deformable convolution to avoid pixel-level noise and efficiently capture hard samples such as small and thin buildings at the global level. Experimental result shows that our method outperforms other methods and efficiently captures complex samples such as a small or narrow building. Moreover, Since our method can be applied to various methods.