MSFANet: multi-scale fusion attention network for mangrove remote sensing lmage segmentation using pattern recognition

Mangroves are ecosystems that grow in the intertidal areas of coastal zones, playing crucial ecological roles and possessing unique economic and social values. They have garnered significant attention and research interest. Semantic segmentation of mangroves is a fundamental step for further investigations. However, mangrove remote sensing images often have large dimensions, with a substantial portion of the image containing mangrove features. Deep learning convolutional kernels may lead to inadequate receptive fields for accurate mangrove recognition. In mangrove remote sensing images, various challenges arise, including the presence of small and intricate details aside from the mangrove regions, which intensify the segmentation complexity. To address these issues, this paper primarily focuses on two key aspects: first, the exploration of methods to achieve a large receptive field, and second, the fusion of multi-scale information. To this end, we propose the Multi-Scale Fusion Attention Network (MSFANet), which incorporates a multi-scale network structure with a large receptive field for feature fusion. We emphasize preserving spatial information by integrating spatial data across different scales, employing separable convolutions to reduce computational complexity. Additionally, we introduce an Attention Fusion Module (AFM). This module helps mitigate the influence of irrelevant information and enhances segmentation quality. To retain more semantic information, this paper introduces a dual channel approach for information extraction through the deep structure of ResNet. We fuse features using the Feature Fusion Module (FFM) to combine both semantic and spatial information for the final output, further enhancing segmentation accuracy. In this study, a total of 230 images with dimensions of 768 pixels in width and height were selected for this experiment, with 184 images used for training and 46 images for validation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves excellent segmentation results on a small sample dataset of remote-sensing images, with significant practical value. This paper primarily focuses on three key aspects: the generation of mangrove datasets, the preprocessing of mangrove data, and the design and training of models. The primary contribution of this paper lies in the development of an effective approach for multi-scale information fusion and advanced feature preservation, providing a novel solution for mangrove remote sensing image segmentation tasks. The best Mean Intersection over Union (MIoU) achieved on the mangrove dataset is 86%, surpassing other existing models by a significant margin.