Agricultural fields are essential in providing human beings with paramount food and other materials. Quick and accurate identification of agricultural fields from the remote sensing images is a crucial task in digital and precision agriculture. Deep learning methods have the advantages of fast and accurate image segmentation, especially for extracting the agricultural fields from remote sensing images. This paper proposed a deep neural network with a dual attention mechanism and a multi-scale feature fusion (Dual Attention and Scale Fusion Network, DASFNet) to extract the cropland from a GaoFen-2 (GF-2) image of 2017 in Alar, south Xinjiang, China. First, we constructed an agricultural field segmentation dataset from the GF-2 image. Next, seven evaluation indices were selected to assess the extraction accuracy, including the location shift, to reveal the spatial relationship and facilitate a better evaluation. Finally, we proposed DASFNet incorporating three ameliorated and novel deep learning modules with the dual attention mechanism and multi-scale feature fusion methods. The comparison of these modules indicated their effects and advantages. Compared with different segmentation convolutional neural networks, DASFNet achieved the best testing accuracy in extracting fields with an F1-score of 0.9017, an intersection over a union of 0.8932, a Kappa coefficient of 0.8869, and a location shift of 1.1752 pixels. Agricultural fields can be extracted automatedly and accurately using DASFNet, which reduces the manual record of the agricultural field information and is conducive to further farmland surveys, protection, and management.
The task of multi-object tracking via deep learning methods for UAV videos has become an important research direction. However, with some current multiple object tracking methods, the relationship between object detection and tracking is not well handled, and decisions on how to make good use of temporal information can affect tracking performance as well. To improve the performance of multi-object tracking, this paper proposes an improved multiple object tracking model based on FairMOT. The proposed model contains a structure to separate the detection and ReID heads to decrease the influence between every function head. Additionally, we develop a temporal embedding structure to strengthen the representational ability of the model. By combing the temporal-association structure and separating different function heads, the model’s performance in object detection and tracking tasks is improved, which has been verified on the VisDrone2019 dataset. Compared with the original method, the proposed model improves MOTA by 4.9% and MOTP by 1.2% and has better tracking performance than the models such as SORT and HDHNet on the UAV video dataset.