LEDCNet: A Lightweight and Efficient Semantic Segmentation Algorithm Using Dual Context Module for Extracting Ground Objects from UAV Aerial Remote Sensing Images

Semantic segmentation of UAV aerial remote sensing images provides a more efficient and convenient surveying and mapping method for traditional surveying and mapping. In order to make the model lightweight and improve a certain accuracy, this research developed a new lightweight and efficient network for the extraction of ground features from UAV aerial remote sensing images, called LDMCNet. Meanwhile, this research develops a powerful lightweight backbone network for the proposed semantic segmentation model. It is called LDCNet, and it is hoped that it can become the backbone network of a new generation of lightweight semantic segmentation algorithms. The proposed model uses dual multi-scale context modules, namely the Atrous Space Pyramid Pooling module (ASPP) and the Object Context Representation module (OCR). In addition, this research constructs a private dataset for semantic segmentation of aerial remote sensing images from drones. This data set contains 2431 training sets, 945 validation sets, and 475 test sets. The proposed model performs well on this dataset, with only 1.4M parameters and 5.48G floating-point operations (FLOPs), achieving an average intersection-over-union ratio (mIoU) of 71.12%. 7.88% higher than the baseline model. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, training on the public datasets "LoveDA" and "CITY-OSM" also achieved excellent results, achieving mIoU of 65.27% and 74.39%, respectively.