A Fully Convolutional Neural Network-Based Approach for Detecting Simultaneously Roads and Buildings in Aerial Imagery

The development of automatic road and building detection systems in aerial imagery are always faced with challenges such as the appearance of buildings, illumination changes, imaging angles, and the density of roads and buildings in urban areas, to name a few. In recent years, employing multi-layered approach in artificial neural networks, known as deep neural networks, has attracted many researchers in this field (and the other fields alike), achieving stunning results. However, the use of fully connected layers in this approach, significantly increases the average processing time and results in an overfitted model. In addition, in most of these methods, a single-class approach has been considered. That is, detecting the roads and the buildings from natural scenes is not possible at the same time, and therefore, it is necessary to build separate binary models for each of them. The main goal of this research is to design a new architecture by which the produced model can be able to simultaneously detect roads and buildings from natural scenes, and thus minimizing the complexity of the classification process. In addition, in the proposed architecture, excluding all fully connected layers from the traditional multi-layered architectures is considered in order to reduce the average processing time. The results of the experiments performed on the Massachusetts dataset, show that the proposed architecture performs 38% faster than the other deep neural network-based methods, and also increases the accuracy by an average of 2%.