The spatial attention mechanism has been widely employed in the semantic segmentation of remote sensing images due to its exceptional capacity for modeling long-range dependencies. However, the analysis performance of remote sensing images can be reduced owing to their large intra-class variance and complex spatial structures. The vanilla spatial attention mechanism relies on the dense affine operations and a fixed scanning mechanism, which often introduces a large amount of redundant contextual semantic information and lacks consideration of cross-directional semantic connections. This paper proposes a new Cross-scan Semantic Cluster Network (CSCN) with integrated Semantic Filtering Contextual Cluster (SFCC) and Cross-scan Scene Coupling Attention (CSCA) modules to address these limitations. Specifically, the SFCC is designed to filter redundant information; feature tokens are clustered into semantically related regions, effectively identifying local features and reducing the impact of intra-class variance. CSCA effectively addresses the challenges of complex spatial geographic backgrounds by decomposing scene information into object distributions and global representations, using scene coupling and cross-scanning mechanisms and computing attention from different directions. Combining SFCC and CSCA, CSCN not only effectively segments various geographic spatial objects in complex scenes but also has low model complexity. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the outstanding performance of the attention model generated using this approach.

Discovering spatially associated objects involves measuring objects’ similarities and retrieving associated objects. The integration of spatial topology and network models for discovering associated objects remains largely unexplored. Here, the concept of a maximum topological accessibility path was developed to quantify objects’ similarity attenuation. Considering the topological accessibility and spatial feature similarity of network nodes, an approach named the Weighted Similarity measure method considering Topological Accessibility (WSTA) is proposed to measure object association. The WSTA can capture both spatial interaction patterns and topological relationships in complex urban environments, thereby improving the accuracy of spatially associated object discovery. The proposed approach is validated using real-world point-of-interest (POI) datasets from Beijing city. The results suggest that integrating topological relationship approaches yields significant accuracy improvements in existing baseline methods, thereby enriching geospatial data retrieval in the era of big geospatial data.