Large-scale semantic classification: outcome of the first year of inria aerial image labeling benchmark

Over the recent years, there has been an increasing interest in large-scale classification of remote sensing images. In this context, the Inria Aerial Image Labeling Benchmark has been released online in December 2016. In this paper, we discuss the outcomes of the first year of the benchmark contest, which consisted in dense labeling of aerial images into building / not building classes, covering areas of five cities not present in the training set. We present four methods with the highest numerical accuracies, all four being convolutional neural network approaches. It is remarkable that three of these methods use the U-net architecture, which has thus proven to become a new standard in image dense labeling.