Self-Constructing Graph Convolutional Networks for Semantic Labeling

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received increasing attention in many fields. However, due to the lack of prior graphs, their use for semantic labeling has been limited. Here, we propose a novel architecture called the Self-Constructing Graph (SCG), which makes use of learnable latent variables to generate embeddings and to self-construct the underlying graphs directly from the input features without relying on manually built prior knowledge graphs. SCG can automatically obtain optimized non-local context graphs from complex-shaped objects in aerial imagery. We optimize SCG via an adaptive diagonal enhancement method and a variational lower bound that consists of a customized graph reconstruction term and a Kullback-Leibler divergence regularization term. We demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed SCG on the publicly available ISPRS Vaihingen dataset and our model SCG-Net achieves competitive results in terms of F1-score with much fewer parameters and at a lower computational cost compared to related pure-CNN based work.