Extracting water bodies from high-resolution remote sensing images has always been a challenging and hot task in the field of remote sensing. Considering that the accuracy and reliability of water body extraction still have some room for improvement, this paper proposes a hybrid network model based on CNN and multi-scale transformer for water body extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images. Specifically, the proposed network first uses a CNN model to extract a series of multi-scale features from shallow to deep from remote sensing images. These multi-scale features are then fed into a designed multi-scale transformer module to extract global contextual association information of water bodies. Afterwards, the water separability in the new multi-scale features output from the multi-scale transformer module is evaluated separately, and the features at different scales are adaptively weighted and fused according to their water separability. Subsequently, the network adaptively refines the fused features with the aid of a hybrid attention model to generate refined features that can effectively distinguish between water bodies and non-water bodies. Finally, these refined features are input into the prediction head to generate the final water body extraction results. The proposed network integrates the ability of CNN to capture local detail features and the ability of transformer to model global contextual semantic associations in a large range. Therefore, it can more accurately identify water bodies in remote sensing images, and the extracted water body boundaries have high accuracy and continuity. Finally, water body extraction experiments on the public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed network. Moreover, the results of comparative experiments also show that compared with existing networks or methods such as U-Net, FCN8s, DeepLabv3+, and MSFA-Net, the proposed network has certain advantages in terms of water body extraction accuracy.

The reliability of remote sensing (RS) image classification is crucial for applying RS image classification results. However, it has received minimal attention, especially the uncertainty of features extracted from RS images. The uncertainty of image features constantly accumulates, propagates, and ultimately affects the reliability and accuracy of image classification results. Thus, research on the quantitative modeling and measurement of the feature uncertainty of RS images is very necessary. To make up for the lack of research on quantitative modeling and measurement of uncertainty of image features, this study first investigates and summarizes the appearance characteristics of the feature uncertainty of RS images in geospatial and feature space domains based on the source and formation mechanisms of feature uncertainty. Then, a modeling and measurement approach for the uncertainty of image features is proposed on the basis of these characteristics. In this approach, a new Local Adaptive Multi-Feature Weighting Method based on Information Entropy and the Local Distribution Density of Points is proposed to model and measure the feature uncertainty of an image in the geospatial and feature space domains. In addition, a feature uncertainty index is also constructed to comprehensively describe and quantify the feature uncertainty, which can also be used to refine the classification map to improve its accuracy. Finally, we propose two effectiveness verification schemes in two perspectives, namely, statistical analysis and image classification, to verify the validity of the proposed approach. Experimental results on two real RS images confirm the validity of the proposed approach. Our study on the feature uncertainty of images may contribute to the development of uncertainty control methods or reliable classification schemes for RS images.

Timely and accurate monitoring of surface water dynamics via remote sensing is critical, given water resources’ importance. However, accurate water body delineation based on high-resolution remotely sensed imagery is still challenging due to the complexity of water bodies’ boundaries and the diversity of their shapes and sizes, which can lead to boundary ambiguity and varying degrees of confusion with near-water vegetation in water body maps. To address this challenge, we introduce an uncertainty-aware hybrid CNN–Transformer model for delineating water bodies using remotely sensed imagery. In our designed network, a multi-scale transformer (MST) module is first designed to effectively model and refine the multi-scale global semantic dependencies of water bodies. Subsequently, an uncertainty-guided multi-scale information fusion (MSIF) module is constructed to extract water body mapping information from these multi-scale features output from the MST module and fuse them adaptively. Across different scales, the extracted features differ in their ability to distinguish water bodies from non-water bodies and in their levels of uncertainty. Consequently, during the adaptive fusion of multi-scale water body information in the MSIF module, the mapping uncertainty is quantified and suppressed to minimize its impact, thus yielding enhanced precision in water body delineation. Ultimately, a comprehensive loss function is designed for model optimization to generate the final water body map. Furthermore, to promote water body segmentation models’ development, this study also presents the HBD_Water water body sample dataset, which contains 44 multispectral, 5000 × 5000-pixel images at 2 m spatial resolution, and will be released on the LuojiaSET platform soon. Finally, to verify the proposed model and its constituent MST and MSIF modules, extensive water mapping experiments were performed on three datasets. The experimental results substantiate their effectiveness. Furthermore, comparative experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model performs better at water body extraction than advanced networks including TransUNet, DeeplabV3+, and ADCNN.