Extraction of Floating Raft Aquaculture Areas from Sentinel-1 SAR Images by a Dense Residual U-Net Model with Pre-Trained Resnet34 as the Encoder

Abstract

Marine floating raft aquaculture (FRA) monitoring is significant for marine ecological environment and food security assessment. Synthetic aperture radar-based monitoring is considered to be an effective means of FRA identification because of its capability for all-weather applications. Considering the poor generalization and extraction accuracy of traditional monitoring methods, a semantic segmentation model called D-ResUnet is proposed to extract FRA areas from Sentinel-1 images. The proposed model has a U-Net-like structure but combines the pre-trained ResNet34 as the encoder and adds dense residual units into the decoder. For this model, the final layer and cropping operation of the original U-Net model are removed to eliminate the model parameters. The mean and standard deviation of Precision, Recall, Intersection over Union (IoU), and F1 score are calculated under a five-fold training strategy to evaluate the model accuracy. The test experiments indicated that the proposed model performs well with the F1 of 92.6% and IoU of 86.24% in FRA extraction tasks. In particular, the ablation experiments and application experiments proved the effectiveness of the improvement strategy and the portability of the proposed D-ResUnet model, respectively. Compared with the other three state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models, the experiments demonstrate a clear accuracy advantage of the D-ResUnet model. For the FRA extraction task, this paper presents a promising approach that has refined extraction capability, high accuracy, and acceptable model complexity.