FA-HRNet: A New Fusion Attention Approach for Vegetation Semantic Segmentation and Analysis

Abstract

Semantic segmentation of vegetation in aerial remote sensing images is a critical aspect of vegetation mapping. Accurate vegetation segmentation effectively informs real-world production and construction activities. However, the presence of species heterogeneity, seasonal variations, and feature disparities within remote sensing images poses significant challenges for vision tasks. Traditional machine learning-based methods often struggle to capture deep-level features for the segmentation. This work proposes a novel deep learning network named FA-HRNet that leverages the fusion of attention mechanism and a multi-branch network structure for vegetation detection and segmentation. Quantitative analysis from multiple datasets reveals that our method outperforms existing approaches, with improvements in MIoU and PA by 2.17% and 4.85%, respectively, compared with the baseline network. Our approach exhibits significant advantages over the other methods regarding cross-region and cross-scale capabilities, providing a reliable vegetation coverage ratio for ecological analysis.