Semantic segmentation of urban environments: Leveraging U-Net deep learning model for cityscape image analysis

Semantic segmentation of cityscapes via deep learning is an essential and game-changing research topic that offers a more nuanced comprehension of urban landscapes. Deep learning techniques tackle urban complexity and diversity, which unlocks a broad range of applications. These include urban planning, transportation management, autonomous driving, and smart city efforts. Through rich context and insights, semantic segmentation helps decision-makers and stakeholders make educated decisions for sustainable and effective urban development. This study investigates an in-depth exploration of cityscape image segmentation using the U-Net deep learning model. The proposed U-Net architecture comprises an encoder and decoder structure. The encoder uses convolutional layers and down sampling to extract hierarchical information from input images. Each down sample step reduces spatial dimensions, and increases feature depth, aiding context acquisition. Batch normalization and dropout layers stabilize models and prevent overfitting during encoding. The decoder reconstructs higher-resolution feature maps using "UpSampling2D" layers. Through extensive experimentation and evaluation of the Cityscapes dataset, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of the U-Net model in achieving state-of-the-art results in image segmentation. The results clearly shown that, the proposed model has high accuracy, mean IOU and mean DICE compared to existing models.