Diff-HRNet: A Diffusion Model-Based High-Resolution Network for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

The semantic segmentation methods based on deep neural networks predominantly employ supervised learning, relying heavily on the quantity and quality of annotated samples. Due to the complexity of high-resolution remote sensing imagery, obtaining sufficient and precise pixel-level labeled data is highly challenging. This letter introduces a novel self-supervised learning method using a pretrained denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) to leverage semantic information from large-scale unlabeled remote sensing imageries. Building on this, a multistage fusion scheme between pretrained features and high-resolution features is proposed, enabling the network to learn more effective strategies to leverage prior information provided by the pretrained model while preserving the rich semantic details of high-resolution images. Experimental results on two remote sensing semantic segmentation datasets show that the proposed Diff-HRNet outperforms all compared methods, demonstrating the potential of pretrained diffusion models in extracting crucial feature representations for semantic segmentation tasks.