CRAUnet++: A New Convolutional Neural Network for Land Surface Water Extraction from Sentinel-2 Imagery by Combining RWI with Improved Unet++

Abstract

Accurately mapping the surface water bodies through remote sensing technology is of great significance for water resources management, flood monitoring, and drought monitoring. At present, many scholars at home and abroad carry out research on deep learning image recognition algorithms based on convolutional neural networks, and a variety of variant-based convolutional neural networks are proposed to be applied to extract water bodies from remote sensing images. However, due to the low depth of convolutional layers employed and underutilization of water spectral feature information, most of the water body extraction methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for remote sensing images are limited in accuracy. In this study, we propose a novel surface water automatic extraction method based on the convolutional neural network (CRAUnet++) for Sentinel-2 images. The proposed method includes three parts: (1) substituting the feature extractor of the original Unet++ with ResNet34 to enhance the network’s complexity by increasing its depth; (2) Embedding the Spatial and Channel ‘Squeeze and Excitation’ (SCSE) module into the up-sampling stage of the network to suppress background features and amplify water body features; (3) adding the vegetation red edge-based water index (RWI) into the input data to maximize the utilization of water body spectral information of Sentinel-2 images without increasing the data processing time. To verify the performance and accuracy of the proposed algorithm, the ablation experiment under four different strategies and comparison experiment with different algorithms of RWI, FCN, SegNet, Unet, and DeepLab v3+ were conducted on Sentinel-2 images of the Poyang Lake. The experimental result shows that the precision, recall, F1, and IoU of CRAUnet++ are 95.99%, 96.41%, 96.19%, and 92.67%, respectively. CRAUnet++ has a good performance in extracting various types of water bodies and suppressing noises because it introduces SCSE attention mechanisms and combines surface water spectral features from RWI, exceeding that of the other five algorithms. The result demonstrates that CRAUnet++ has high validity and reliability in extracting surface water bodies based on Sentinel-2 images.