Object-oriented U-GCN for open-pit mining extraction from high spatial resolution remote-sensing images of complex scenes

Precise extraction of open-pit mines is crucial for resource management and ecological and environmental dynamic monitoring. Current methods for extracting open-pit mines encounter challenges such as low accuracy and difficulty detecting complex scenes of open-pit mining. To address these issues, this paper proposes an object-oriented intelligent extraction method for complex mining scenes using Gaofen-2(GF-2) high-resolution remote-sensing images, which expresses the pixel-level features at the object level and utilizes the unique feature propagation and aggregation capabilities of the graph structure for the extraction of the mines. First, an object-oriented feature expression strategy is introduced to express multi-level pixel-level features as object-level features by constructing objects with appropriate multi-resolution segmentation parameters. This approach effectively reduces the impact of isolated pixel noise and outliers on classification results. Second, this paper proposes a U-GCN-based open-pit mining extraction method that combines the powerful multi-level feature extraction capabilities of U-GCN to propagate and aggregate information in a graph structure, effectively modelling spatial relationships between different objects. This method achieves high-precision extraction of open-pit mining areas. In experiments conducted on two study areas of varying scales, the F1 scores for open-pit mine extraction reached 93.32% and 83.06%. Comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed object-oriented U-GCN method performs superiorly in terms of accuracy, stability and robustness across mining scenes with different levels of complexity. The proposed open-pit mine extraction method offers new insights and methodologies for current extraction practices.