Remote Sensing Images Semantic Segmentation with General Remote Sensing Vision Model via a Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning Method

A new learning paradigm, self-supervised learning (SSL), can be used to solve such problems by pre-training a general model with large unlabeled images and then fine-tuning on a downstream task with very few labeled samples. Contrastive learning is a typical method of SSL, which can learn general invariant features. However, most of the existing contrastive learning is designed for classification tasks to obtain an image-level representation, which may be sub-optimal for semantic segmentation tasks requiring pixel-level discrimination. Therefore, we propose Global style and Local matching Contrastive Learning Network (GLCNet) for remote sensing semantic segmentation. Specifically, the global style contrastive module is used to learn an image-level representation better, as we consider the style features can better represent the overall image features; The local features matching contrastive module is designed to learn representations of local regions which is beneficial for semantic segmentation. We evaluate four remote sensing semantic segmentation datasets, and the experimental results show that our method mostly outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised methods and ImageNet pre-training. Specifically, with 1\% annotation from the original dataset, our approach improves Kappa by 6\% on the ISPRS Potsdam dataset and 3\% on Deep Globe Land Cover Classification dataset relative to the existing baseline. Moreover, our method outperforms supervised learning when there are some differences between the datasets of upstream tasks and downstream tasks. Our study promotes the development of self-supervised learning in the field of remote sensing semantic segmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/GeoX-Lab/G-RSIM.