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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B2-2020-667-2020</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>IMPROVING THE CLASSIFICATION OF LAND USE OBJECTS USING DENSE CONNECTIVITY OF CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Gujrathi</surname>
<given-names>A.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yang</surname>
<given-names>C.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Rottensteiner</surname>
<given-names>F.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Buddhiraju</surname>
<given-names>K. M.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Heipke</surname>
<given-names>C.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Institute of Photogrammetry and GeoInformation, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>12</day>
<month>08</month>
<year>2020</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIII-B2-2020</volume>
<fpage>667</fpage>
<lpage>673</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2020 A. Gujrathi et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2020</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIII-B2-2020/667/2020/isprs-archives-XLIII-B2-2020-667-2020.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIII-B2-2020/667/2020/isprs-archives-XLIII-B2-2020-667-2020.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIII-B2-2020/667/2020/isprs-archives-XLIII-B2-2020-667-2020.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIII-B2-2020/667/2020/isprs-archives-XLIII-B2-2020-667-2020.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>&lt;i&gt;Land use&lt;/i&gt; is an important variable in remote sensing which describes the functions carried out on a piece of land in order to obtain benefits and is especially useful to the personnel working in the fields of urban management and planning. The land use information is maintained by national mapping agencies in geo-spatial databases. Commonly, land use data is stored in the form of polygon objects; the label of the object indicates land use. The main goal of classification of land use objects is to update an existing database in an automatic process. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been widely used to tackle this task utilizing high resolution aerial images (and derived data such as digital surface model). One big challenge classifying polygons is to deal with the large variation in their geometrical extent. For this challenge, we adopt the method of Yang et al. (2019) to decompose polygons into regular patches of fixed size. The decomposition leads to two sets of polygons: &lt;i&gt;small&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;large&lt;/i&gt;, where the former suffers from a lower identification rate. In this paper, we propose CNN methods which incorporate &lt;i&gt;dense connectivity&lt;/i&gt; and integrate it with intermediate information via &lt;i&gt;global average pooling&lt;/i&gt; to improve land use classification, mainly focusing on &lt;i&gt;small&lt;/i&gt; polygons. We present different network variants by incorporating intermediate information via &lt;i&gt;global average pooling&lt;/i&gt; from different stages of the network. We test our methods on two sites; our experiments show that the dense connectivity and integration of intermediate information has a positive effect not only on the classification accuracy on the whole but also on the identification of small polygons.</p>
</abstract>
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