Assessing the Influences of Band Selection and Pretrained Weights on Semantic-Segmentation-Based Refugee Dwelling Extraction from Satellite Imagery

Abstract. This research assessed the influences of four band combinations and three types of pretrained weights on the performance of semantic segmentation in extracting refugee dwelling footprints of the Kule refugee camp in Ethiopia during a dry season and a wet season from very high spatial resolution imagery. We chose a classical network, U-Net with VGG16 as a backbone, for all segmentation experiments. The selected band combinations include 1) RGBN (Red, Green, Blue, and Near Infrared), 2) RGB, 3) RGN, and 4) RNB. The three types of pretrained weights are 1) randomly initialized weights, 2) pretrained weights from ImageNet, and 3) weights pretrained on data from the Bria refugee camp in the Central African Republic). The results turn out that three-band combinations outperform RGBN bands across all types of weights and seasons. Replacing the B or G band with the N band can improve the performance in extracting dwellings during the wet season but cannot bring improvement to the dry season in general. Pretrained weights from ImageNet achieve the best performance. Weights pretrained on data from the Bria refugee camp produced the lowest IoU and Recall values.