Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is widely used for semantic segmentation and land-use and land-cover (LULC) mapping of very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. The convolution operation is a powerful method for VHR classification, but the loss of high-frequency detail information caused during its operation decreases the classification accuracy, particularly in the boundary. Thus, it is necessary to supply additional boundary information to the CNN for alleviating this situation. In the classification task (and in LULC mapping), providing more effective information generates a better classification result. Current methods regard the boundary of images as the same category object and process it uniformly, which loses a notable amount of useful information because of the different properties, such as ambiguity and transition, between remote sensing images and their boundaries. Thus, a semantic segmentation method with category boundary for LULC mapping is proposed in this paper. First, a multi-task CNN called the category boundary detection network (CBDN) is designed to extract the boundary information of different category objects. Second, this category boundary and VHR images are used for initial semantic segmentation. Finally, the category boundary and the initial semantic segmentation result (ISSR) are fused to obtain the final LULC map by a two-step strategy, including the explicit fusion and the boundary attention loss function. To verify whether category boundary improved the classification accuracy, a set of comparative experiments were conducted on the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets. The method in this paper was compared with a semantic segmentation method with no boundary information and a semantic segmentation method with global boundary. The results showed that the proposed method in this paper achieved good performances in the Vaihingen (overall accuracy (OA) = 0.924, Kappa coefficient (K) = 0.898, mean F1 score (mF1) = 0.896 and mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) = 0.817) and Potsdam datasets (OA = 0.890, K = 0.857, mF1 = 0.923, and mIoU = 0.860) based on the eroded labels.

The accurate extraction of an aquaculture area is significant in aquaculture management, post disaster evaluation, and aquatic environment protection. However, little attention has been paid to the aquaculture area extraction in coastal water with high turbidity. In this study, based on the spectral and geospatial features of aquaculture cages in complex coastal water with varying turbidity, we proposed a new aquaculture area extraction method using a Gaofen-2(GF-2) satellite image with 0.8m spatial resolution. The water was classified into clear, medium, and high turbidity categories according to the suspended sediment concentration (SSC) derived from the inversion of the GF-2 image. Different rules of extraction were developed with respect to those three categories of water body: (1) The Normalized Difference Water Index(NDWI) threshold was set for the clear water, (2) a ratio index (R=Green/NIR) was established for the medium turbid water body, and (3) for the turbid water body, feature analysis with a specified classification rule was established. The experimental results demonstrated that our proposed method worked well, with the high accuracies of 87.3300% for the overall accuracy, even for the high turbidity water. The Kappa coefficient was 0.7375, which was much better than the Kappa coefficient values of the three conventional classification methods represented in this paper. This study provides effective information support and auxiliary decision analysis for management departments to scientifically plan and environmentally manage coastal aquaculture areas.

Hyperspectral images (HSI) contain powerful spectral characterization capabilities and are widely used especially for classification applications. However, the rich spectrum contained in HSI also increases the difficulty of extracting useful information, which makes the feature extraction method significant as it enables effective expression and utilization of the spectrum. Traditional HSI feature extraction methods design spectral features manually, which is likely to be limited by the complex spectral information within HSI. Recently, data-driven methods, especially the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have shown great improvements in performance when processing image data owing to their powerful automatic feature learning and extraction abilities and are also widely used for HSI feature extraction and classification. The CNN extracts features based on the convolution operation. Nevertheless, the local perception of the convolution operation makes CNN focus on the local spectral features (LSF) and weakens the description of features between long-distance spectral ranges, which will be referred to as global spectral features (GSF) in this study. LSF and GSF describe the spectral features from two different perspectives and are both essential for determining the spectrum. Thus, in this study, a local-global spectral feature (LGSF) extraction and optimization method is proposed to jointly consider the LSF and GSF for HSI classification. To increase the relationship between spectra and the possibility to obtain features with more forms, we first transformed the 1D spectral vector into a 2D spectral image. Based on the spectral image, the local spectral feature extraction module (LSFEM) and the global spectral feature extraction module (GSFEM) are proposed to automatically extract the LGSF. The loss function for spectral feature optimization is proposed to optimize the LGSF and obtain improved class separability inspired by contrastive learning. We further enhanced the LGSF by introducing spatial relation and designed a CNN constructed using dilated convolution for classification. The proposed method was evaluated on four widely used HSI datasets, and the results highlighted its comprehensive utilization of spectral information as well as its effectiveness in HSI classification.