River Extraction from Remote Sensing Images in Cold and Arid Regions Based on Attention Mechanism

The extraction of rivers in cold and arid regions is of great significance for applications such as ecological environment monitoring, agricultural planning, and disaster warning. However, there are few related studies on river extraction in cold and arid regions, and it is still in its infancy. The accuracy of river extraction is low, and the details are blurred. The rapid development of deep learning has provided us with new ideas, but with lack of corresponding professional datasets, the accuracy of the current semantic segmentation network is not high. This study mainly presents the following. (1) According to the characteristics of cold and arid regions, a professional dataset was made to support the extraction of rivers from remote sensing images in these regions. (2) Combine transfer learning and deep learning, migrate the ResNet-101 network to the LinkNet network, and introduce the attention mechanism to obtain the AR-LinkNet network, which is used to improve the recognition accuracy of the network. (3) A channel attention module and a spatial attention module with residual structure are proposed to strengthen the effective features and improve the segmentation accuracy. (4) Combining dense atrous spatial pyramid pooling (DenseASPP) with AR-LinkNet network expands the network receptive field, which can extract more detailed information and increase the coherence of extracted rivers. (5) For the first time, the binary cross-entropy loss function combined with the Dice loss function is applied to river extraction as a new loss function, which accelerates the network convergence and improves the image quality. Validation on the dataset shows that, compared with typical semantic segmentation networks, the method performs better on evaluation metrics such as recall, intersection ratio, precision, and score, and the extracted rivers are clearer and more coherent.