A Universal Landslide Detection Method in Optical Remote Sensing Images Based on Improved YOLOX

Using deep learning-based object detection algorithms for landslide hazards detection is very popular and effective. However, most existing algorithms are designed for landslides in a specific geographical range. This paper constructs a set of landslide detection models YOLOX-Pro, based on the improved YOLOX (You Only Look Once) target detection model to address the poor detection of complex mixed landslides. Wherein the VariFocal is used to replace the binary cross entropy in the original classification loss function to solve the uneven distribution of landslide samples and improve the detection recall; the coordinate attention (CA) mechanism is added to enhance the detection accuracy. Firstly, 1200 historical landslide optical remote sensing images in thirty-eight areas of China were extracted from Google Earth to create a mixed sample set for landslide detection. Next, the three attention mechanisms were compared to form the YOLOX-Pro model. Then, we tested the performance of YOLOX-Pro by comparing it with four models: YOLOX, YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, and Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD). The results show that the YOLOX-Pro(m) has significantly improved the detection accuracy of complex and small landslides than the other models, with an average precision (AP0.75) of 51.5%, APsmall of 36.50%, and ARsmall of 49.50%. In addition, optical remote sensing images of a 12.32 km(2) group-occurring landslides area located in Mibei village, Longchuan County, Guangdong, China, and 750 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images collected from the Internet were also used for landslide detection. The research results proved that the proposed method has strong generalization and good detection performance for many types of landslides, which provide a technical reference for the broad application of landslide detection using UAV.