# Classification With an Edge: Improving Semantic Image Segmentation with Boundary Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.01337 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01337/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [UNetFormer: A UNet-like Transformer for Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Urban Scene Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08937/) (2021)
- [A Novel Transformer Based Semantic Segmentation Scheme for Fine-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12137/) (2021)
- [SAM-Assisted Remote Sensing Imagery Semantic Segmentation with Object and Boundary Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02464/) (2023)
- [Semantic Diffusion Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02057/) (2023)
- [PointFlow: Flowing Semantics Through Points for Aerial Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06564/) (2021)
- [Transformer Meets Convolution: A Bilateral Awareness Network for Semantic Segmentation of Very Fine Resolution Urban Scene Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12413/) (2021)
- [Looking Outside the Window: Wide-Context Transformer for the Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15754/) (2021)
- [ABCNet: Attentive Bilateral Contextual Network for Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02531/) (2021)
- [HED-UNet: Combined Segmentation and Edge Detection for Monitoring the Antarctic Coastline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01849/) (2021)
- [Mapping oil palm density at country scale: An active learning approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11207/) (2021)
- [Weighted Intersection over Union (wIoU) for Evaluating Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09858/) (2021)
- [Curriculum-style Local-to-global Adaptation for Cross-domain Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01539/) (2022)
- [Not Just Learning from Others but Relying on Yourself: A New Perspective on Few-Shot Segmentation in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12452/) (2023)
- [Country-wide Retrieval of Forest Structure From Optical and SAR Satellite Imagery With Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13154/) (2021)
- [SBSS: Stacking-Based Semantic Segmentation Framework for Very High Resolution Remote Sensing Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07623/) (2022)
- [MultiScene: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-scene Recognition in Single Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02846/) (2021)
- [An Attention-Fused Network for Semantic Segmentation of Very-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04132/) (2021)
- [Implicit Ray-Transformers for Multi-view Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08401/) (2023)
- [IRSAMap:Towards Large-Scale, High-Resolution Land Cover Map Vectorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16272/) (2025)
- [Aerial Scene Understanding in The Wild: Multi-Scene Recognition via Prototype-based Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11200/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Review of Agricultural Parcel and Boundary Delineation from Remote Sensing Images: Recent Progress and Future Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14558/) (2025)
- [Sea ice detection using concurrent multispectral and synthetic aperture radar imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06009/) (2024)
- [A hierarchical deep learning framework for the consistent classification of land use objects in geospatial databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06991/) (2021)
- [Empirical Study of Multi-Task Hourglass Model for Semantic Segmentation Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13531/) (2021)
- [Multi-modal land cover mapping of remote sensing images using pyramid attention and gated fusion networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03845/) (2021)
- [Semantic Labeling of High Resolution Images Using EfficientUNets and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09731/) (2022)
- [Manifold-Aware Local Feature Modeling for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10287/) (2024)
- [Neural Edge Histogram Descriptors for Underwater Acoustic Target Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13763/) (2025)
- [A Gift from the Integration of Discriminative and Diffusion-based Generative Learning: Boundary Refinement Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01573/) (2025)
- [A2-FPN for Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remotely Sensed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07997/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present an end-to-end trainable deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for semantic segmentation with built-in awareness of semantically meaningful boundaries. Semantic segmentation is a fundamental remote sensing task, and most state-of-the-art methods rely on DCNNs as their workhorse. A major reason for their success is that deep networks learn to accumulate contextual information over very large windows (receptive fields). However, this success comes at a cost, since the associated loss of effecive spatial resolution washes out high-frequency details and leads to blurry object boundaries. Here, we propose to counter this effect by combining semantic segmentation with semantically informed edge detection, thus making class-boundaries explicit in the model, First, we construct a comparatively simple, memory-efficient model by adding boundary detection to the Segnet encoder-decoder architecture. Second, we also include boundary detection in FCN-type models and set up a high-end classifier ensemble. We show that boundary detection significantly improves semantic segmentation with CNNs. Our high-end ensemble achieves > 90% overall accuracy on the ISPRS Vaihingen benchmark.