Unsupervised Superpixel-Driven Parcel Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images Using Graph Convolutional Network

Abstract

Accurate parcel segmentation of remote sensing images plays an important role in ensuring various downstream tasks. Traditionally, parcel segmentation is based on supervised learning using precise parcel-level ground truth information, which is difficult to obtain. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end unsupervised Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)-based framework for superpixel-driven parcel segmentation of remote sensing images. The key component is a novel graph-based superpixel aggregation model, which effectively learns superpixels' latent affinities and better aggregates similar ones in spatial and spectral spaces. We construct a multi-temporal multi-location testing dataset using Sentinel-2 images and the ground truth annotations in four different regions. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our proposed model. The best performance is achieved by our model compared with the competing methods.