Swin Transformer Embedding UNet for Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation

Global context information is essential for the semantic segmentation of remote sensing (RS) images. However, most existing methods rely on a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is challenging to directly obtain the global context due to the locality of the convolution operation. Inspired by the Swin transformer with powerful global modeling capabilities, we propose a novel semantic segmentation framework for RS images called ST-U-shaped network (UNet), which embeds the Swin transformer into the classical CNN-based UNet. ST-UNet constitutes a novel dual encoder structure of the Swin transformer and CNN in parallel. First, we propose a spatial interaction module (SIM), which encodes spatial information in the Swin transformer block by establishing pixel-level correlation to enhance the feature representation ability of occluded objects. Second, we construct a feature compression module (FCM) to reduce the loss of detailed information and condense more small-scale features in patch token downsampling of the Swin transformer, which improves the segmentation accuracy of small-scale ground objects. Finally, as a bridge between dual encoders, a relational aggregation module (RAM) is designed to integrate global dependencies from the Swin transformer into the features from CNN hierarchically. Our ST-UNet brings significant improvement on the ISPRS-Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets, respectively. The code will be available at <uri>https://github.com/XinnHe/ST-UNet</uri>.