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

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.

Minglong Li, Lianlei Shan, Weiqiang Wang, Ke Lv, Bin Luo, Si-Bao Chen · 2025