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The intelligent segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing (HRS) image, also called as dense prediction task for HRS image, has been and will continue to be important research in the remote sensing community. In recent years, the growing wave of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has introduced innovative paradigms to this domain, yielding outstanding results and overcoming many challenges with conventional segmentation techniques. This paper provides a comprehensive review of these intelligent segmentation methodologies, including traditional pattern recognition, convolution neural network (CNN)-based, and Transformer-based techniques. However, the explosive but incomplete development of intelligent segmentation techniques also poses more challenges for earth observation experts, the most of which is the technical interpretability. Consequently, we consider these segmentation techniques in the aspect of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). Data-centric XAI thinks the practical applications of the segmentation model while model-centric XAI will facilitate the understanding of decision-making processes and the adjustment of structural features. Moreover, this review identifies novel research questions and provides constructive insights and recommendations to HRS image segmentation tasks, which may shed new light on the intelligent segmentation methods within the remote sensing image understanding community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic building detection from remote sensing images holds significant applications in various domains, including cartography, land-use change detection, urban planning, and 3D intelligent city construction. Driven by the innovation of deep learning technology, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as a powerful framework for automatic interpretation, exhibiting hierarchical feature generation and robust representation for building extraction. However, the inherent computational limitations of convolutional operators hinder the acquisition of an effective global receptive field. Recent advancements in deep learning have witnessed the adoption of the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism by Transformer, presenting the superiority of global context construction. Nonetheless, this network structure encounters difficulties in effectively modelling two-dimensional spatial structure features with scale variation in semantic segmentation and often has huge parameters with high algorithm complexity. To address the above problems, this paper proposed a hybrid deep neural network synergistically harnessing the superiority of CNN and Transformer to extract buildings from remote sensing images. Meanwhile, an improved MHSA mechanism is developed to facilitate the construction of multiscale global representations, concurrently reducing computational complexity. Furthermore, the cross-level MHSA modules the semantic correlation between the deep and shallow-level features to refine spatial fine-grained information. The proposed method was comprehensively evaluated on two building datasets via quantitative analysis and visualization. The experimental results confirmed that the developed network and modules outperform other state-of-the-art methods and can effectively improve the accuracy (93.4% F1-score on the WHU dataset, 89.38% F1-score on the CAMB dataset) with high efficiency for building extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of pan-sharpening is to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by combining multispectral images (MS) and panchromatic images (PAN), which have become an important part of remote sensing image processing. Therefore, how to better extract complete feature information from MS images and PAN images has become the focus of our attention. In this paper, we propose a new pansharpening method, called Transformer-based Dual-path cross fusion network (TDF) for Pan-sharpening remote sensing images, which aims to extract the spatial details of PAN images while maintaining the spectral fidelity of MS images. The whole network structure can be divided into two parts: in the encoder part, we adopt the Swin-Transformer module for the downsampling operation, which expands the sensory field of the network to the feature map, and then extracts the global information. However, since the Swin-Transformer module is not good at extracting pixel-level details, we introduce the Base Feature Extraction (BFE) and the Invertible Neural Network Block (INNB) modules for the interaction between the local and the global feature information. we also introduce the Edge-Enhancement Block (EEB) to further enhance the feature extraction at multi-scales during the image fusion process. In the decoder section, we once again employ the Swin Transformer module for downsampling. After the convolution operation and activation function, we utilize the Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network for upsampling to generate the ultimate high-resolution multispectral images. Simulation experiments and real experiments are conducted on QuickBird (QB) and WorldView2 (WV2) datasets, which demonstrated our method are superior to the current methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]