Efficient transformer for remote sensing image segmentation

Abstract

Semantic segmentation for remote sensing images (RSIs) is widely applied in geological surveys, urban resources management, and disaster monitoring. Recent solutions on remote sensing segmentation tasks are generally addressed by CNN-based models and transformer-based models. In particular, transformer-based architecture generally struggles with two main problems: a high computation load and inaccurate edge classification. Therefore, to overcome these problems, we propose a novel transformer model to realize lightweight edge classification. First, based on a Swin transformer backbone, a pure Efficient transformer with mlphead is proposed to accelerate the inference speed. Moreover, explicit and implicit edge enhancement methods are proposed to cope with object edge problems. The experimental results evaluated on the Potsdam and Vaihingen datasets present that the proposed approach significantly improved the final accuracy, achieving a trade-off between computational complexity (Flops) and accuracy (Efficient-L obtaining 3.23% mIoU improvement on Vaihingen and 2.46% mIoU improvement on Potsdam compared with HRCNet_W48). As a result, it is believed that the proposed Efficient transformer will have an advantage in dealing with remote sensing image segmentation problems.