Hybrid Shunted Transformer embedding UNet for remote sensing image semantic segmentation

With the development of deep learning, Remote Sensing Image (RSI) semantic segmentation has produced significant advances. However, due to the sparse distribution of the objects and the high similarity between classes, the task of semantic segmentation in RSI is still extremely challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic segmentation framework for RSI called HST-UNet that can overcome the shortcomings of the existing models and extract and recover the global and local features of RSI, which is a hybrid semantic segmentation model with Shunted Transformer as encoder and Multi-Scale Convolutional Attention Network (MSCAN) as decoder. Then, to better fuse the information from the Encoder and the Decoder and alleviate the ambiguity, we design a Learnable Weighted Fusion (LWF) module to effectively connect to the decoder features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed HST-UNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving F1 score/MIoU accuracy of 71.44%/83.00% on the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset and 77.36%/87.09% on ISPRS Potsdam dataset. The code will be available at https://github.com/HC-Zhou/HST-UNet. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.