Segmentation of Roads in Satellite Images using specially modified U-Net CNNs

The image classification problem has been deeply investigated by the research community, with computer vision algorithms and with the help of Neural Networks. The aim of this paper is to build an image classifier for satellite images of urban scenes that identifies the portions of the images in which a road is located, separating these portions from the rest. Unlike conventional computer vision algorithms, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provide accurate and reliable results on this task. Our novel approach uses a sliding window to extract patches out of the whole image, data augmentation for generating more training/testing data and lastly a series of specially modified U-Net CNNs. This proposed technique outperforms all other baselines tested in terms of mean F-score metric.