Building Lightweight Semantic Segmentation Models for Aerial Images Using Dual Relation Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Minglong, Shan, Lianlei, Wang, Weiqiang, Lv, Ke, Luo, Bin, Chen, Si-Bao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911022528331776
author Li, Minglong
Shan, Lianlei
Wang, Weiqiang
Lv, Ke
Luo, Bin
Chen, Si-Bao
author_facet Li, Minglong
Shan, Lianlei
Wang, Weiqiang
Lv, Ke
Luo, Bin
Chen, Si-Bao
contents Recently, there have been significant improvements in the accuracy of CNN models for semantic segmentation. However, these models are often heavy and suffer from low inference speed, which limits their practical application. To address this issue, knowledge distillation has emerged as a promising approach to achieve a good trade-off between segmentation accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel dual relation distillation (DRD) technique that transfers both spatial and channel relations in feature maps from a cumbersome model (teacher) to a compact model (student). Specifically, we compute spatial and channel relation maps separately for the teacher and student models, and then align corresponding relation maps by minimizing their distance. Since the teacher model usually learns more information and collects richer spatial and channel correlations than the student model, transferring these correlations from the teacher to the student can help the student mimic the teacher better in terms of feature distribution, thus improving the segmentation accuracy of the student model. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three segmentation datasets, including two widely adopted benchmarks in the remote sensing field (Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets) and one popular benchmark in general scene (Cityscapes dataset). The experimental results demonstrate that our novel distillation framework can significantly boost the performance of the student network without incurring extra computational overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_20688
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Building Lightweight Semantic Segmentation Models for Aerial Images Using Dual Relation Distillation
Li, Minglong
Shan, Lianlei
Wang, Weiqiang
Lv, Ke
Luo, Bin
Chen, Si-Bao
Image and Video Processing
Recently, there have been significant improvements in the accuracy of CNN models for semantic segmentation. However, these models are often heavy and suffer from low inference speed, which limits their practical application. To address this issue, knowledge distillation has emerged as a promising approach to achieve a good trade-off between segmentation accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel dual relation distillation (DRD) technique that transfers both spatial and channel relations in feature maps from a cumbersome model (teacher) to a compact model (student). Specifically, we compute spatial and channel relation maps separately for the teacher and student models, and then align corresponding relation maps by minimizing their distance. Since the teacher model usually learns more information and collects richer spatial and channel correlations than the student model, transferring these correlations from the teacher to the student can help the student mimic the teacher better in terms of feature distribution, thus improving the segmentation accuracy of the student model. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three segmentation datasets, including two widely adopted benchmarks in the remote sensing field (Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets) and one popular benchmark in general scene (Cityscapes dataset). The experimental results demonstrate that our novel distillation framework can significantly boost the performance of the student network without incurring extra computational overhead.
title Building Lightweight Semantic Segmentation Models for Aerial Images Using Dual Relation Distillation
topic Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20688