MCANet: A Multi-Branch Network for Cloud/Snow Segmentation in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images
Kai Hu, Enwei Zhang, Min Xia, Liguo Weng, Haifeng Lin
Abstract
Because clouds and snow block the underlying surface and interfere with the information extracted from an image, the accurate segmentation of cloud/snow regions is essential for imagery preprocessing for remote sensing. Nearly all remote sensing images have a high resolution and contain complex and diverse content, which makes the task of cloud/snow segmentation more difficult. A multi-branch convolutional attention network (MCANet) is suggested in this study. A double-branch structure is adopted, and the spatial information and semantic information in the image are extracted. In this way, the model’s feature extraction ability is improved. Then, a fusion module is suggested to correctly fuse the feature information gathered from several branches. Finally, to address the issue of information loss in the upsampling process, a new decoder module is constructed by combining convolution with a transformer to enhance the recovery ability of image information; meanwhile, the segmentation boundary is repaired to refine the edge information. This paper conducts experiments on the high-resolution remote sensing image cloud/snow detection dataset (CSWV), and conducts generalization experiments on two publicly available datasets (HRC_WHU and L8 SPARCS), and the self-built cloud and cloud shadow dataset. The MIOU scores on the four datasets are 92.736%, 91.649%, 80.253%, and 94.894%, respectively. The experimental findings demonstrate that whether it is for cloud/snow detection or more complex multi-category detection tasks, the network proposed in this paper can completely restore the target details, and it provides a stronger degree of robustness and superior segmentation capabilities.