Satellite Image for Cloud and Snow Recognition Based on Lightweight Feature Map Attention Network

Cloud and snow recognition technology is of great significance in the field of meteorology, and is also widely used in remote sensing mapping, aerospace, and other fields. Based on the traditional method of manually labeling cloud-snow areas, a method of labeling cloud and snow areas using deep learning technology has been gradually developed to improve the accuracy and efficiency of recognition. In this paper, from the perspective of designing an efficient and lightweight network model, a cloud snow recognition model based on a lightweight feature map attention network (Lw-fmaNet) is proposed to ensure the performance and accuracy of the cloud snow recognition model. The model is improved based on the ResNet18 network with the premise of reducing the network parameters and improving the training efficiency. The main structure of the model includes a shallow feature extraction module, an intrinsic feature mapping module, and a lightweight adaptive attention mechanism. Overall, in the experiments conducted in this paper, the accuracy of the proposed cloud and snow recognition model reaches 95.02%, with a Kappa index of 93.34%. The proposed method achieves an average precision rate of 94.87%, an average recall rate of 94.79%, and an average F1-Score of 94.82% for four sample recognition classification tasks: no snow and no clouds, thin cloud, thick cloud, and snow cover. Meanwhile, our proposed network has only 5.617M parameters and takes only 2.276 s. Compared with multiple convolutional neural networks and lightweight networks commonly used for cloud and snow recognition, our proposed lightweight feature map attention network has a better performance when it comes to performing cloud and snow recognition tasks.