ResU-Former: Advancing Remote Sensing Image Segmentation with Swin Residual Transformer for Precise Global–Local Feature Recognition and Visual–Semantic Space Learning

Abstract

In the field of remote sensing image segmentation, achieving high accuracy and efficiency in diverse and complex environments remains a challenge. Additionally, there is a notable imbalance between the underlying features and the high-level semantic information embedded within remote sensing images, and both global and local recognition improvements are also limited by the multi-scale remote sensing scenery and imbalanced class distribution. These challenges are further compounded by inaccurate local localization segmentation and the oversight of small-scale features. To achieve balance between visual space and semantic space, to increase both global and local recognition accuracy, and to enhance the flexibility of input scale features while supplementing global contextual information, in this paper, we propose a U-shaped hierarchical structure called ResU-Former. The incorporation of the Swin Residual Transformer block allows for the efficient segmentation of objects of varying sizes against complex backgrounds, a common scenario in remote sensing datasets. With the specially designed Swin Residual Transformer block as its fundamental unit, ResU-Former accomplishes the full utilization and evolution of information, and the maximum optimization of semantic segmentation in complex remote sensing scenarios. The standard experimental results on benchmark datasets such as Vaihingen, Overall Accuracy of 81.5%, etc., show the ResU-Former’s potential to improve segmentation tasks across various remote sensing applications.