Water Body Extraction in Remote Sensing Imagery Using Domain Adaptation-Based Network Embedding Selective Self-Attention and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

A water body is a common object in remote sensing images and high-quality water body extraction is important for some further applications. With the development of deep learning (DL) in recent years, semantic segmentation technology based on deep convolution neural network (DCNN) brings a new way for automatic and high-quality body extraction from remote sensing images. Although several methods have been proposed, there exist two major problems in water body extraction, especially for high resolution remote sensing images. One is that it is difficult to effectively detect both large and small water bodies simultaneously and accurately predict the edge position of water bodies with DCNN-based methods, and the other is that DL methods need a large number of labeled samples which are often insufficient in practical application. In this paper, a novel SFnet-DA network based on the domain adaptation (DA) embedding selective self-attention (SSA) mechanism and multi-scale feature fusion (MFF) module is proposed to deal with these problems. Specially, the SSA mechanism is used to increase or decrease the space detail and semantic information, respectively, in the bottom-up branches of the network by selective feature enhancement, thus it can improve the detection capability of water bodies with drastic scale change and can prevent the prediction from being affected by other factors, such as roads and green algae. Furthermore, the MFF module is used to accurately acquire edge information by changing the number of the channel of advanced feature branches with a unique fusion method. To skip the labeling work, SFnet-DA reduces the difference in feature distribution between labeled and unlabeled datasets by building an adversarial relationship between the feature extractor and the domain classifier, so that the trained parameters of the labeled datasets can be directly used to predict the unlabeled images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SFnet-DA has better performance on water body segmentation than state-of-the-art methods.

Automated summary

Water body extraction from remote sensing images using deep learning faces challenges in detecting both large and small water bodies, accurately predicting the edge position, and lack of labeled samples. This paper proposes a novel SFnet-DA network based on domain adaptation and multi-scale feature fusion to address these issues, which shows better performance in water body segmentation compared to current methods.