HA-Net for Bare Soil Extraction Using Optical Remote Sensing Images

Bare soil will cause soil erosion and contribute to air pollution through the generation of dust, making the timely and effective monitoring of bare soil an urgent requirement for environmental management. Although there have been some researches on bare soil extraction using high-resolution remote sensing images, great challenges still need to be solved, such as complex background interference and small-scale problems. In this regard, the Hybrid Attention Network (HA-Net) is proposed for automatic extraction of bare soil from high-resolution remote sensing images, which includes the encoder and the decoder. In the encoder, HA-Net initially utilizes BoTNet for primary feature extraction, producing four-level features. The extracted highest-level features are then input into the constructed Spatial Information Perception Module (SIPM) and the Channel Information Enhancement Module (CIEM) to emphasize the spatial and channel dimensions of bare soil information adequately. To improve the detection rate of small-scale bare soil areas, during the decoding stage, the Semantic Restructuring-based Upsampling Module (SRUM) is proposed, which utilizes the semantic information from input features and compensate for the loss of detailed information during downsampling in the encoder. An experiment is performed based on high-resolution remote sensing images from the China–Brazil Resources Satellite 04A. The results show that HA-Net obviously outperforms several excellent semantic segmentation networks in bare soil extraction. The average precision and IoU of HA-Net in two scenes can reach 90.9% and 80.9%, respectively, which demonstrates the excellent performance of HA-Net. It embodies the powerful ability of HA-Net for suppressing the interference from complex backgrounds and solving multiscale issues. Furthermore, it may also be used to perform excellent segmentation tasks for other targets from remote sensing images.