Journal Article

U-MGA: A Multi-Module Unet Optimized with Multi-Scale Global Attention Mechanisms for Fine-Grained Segmentation of Cultivated Areas

Xie, Yiheng, Tang, Lingli, Zhang, Yu, Wang, Xinhong, Chen, Yun, Yang, Yanli, Yao, Weiyuan

2025

Overview

Arable land is fundamental to agricultural production and a crucial component of ecosystems. However, its complex texture and distribution in remote sensing images make it susceptible to interference from other land cover types, such as water bodies, roads, and buildings, complicating accurate identification. Building on previous research, this study proposes an efficient and lightweight CNN-based network, U-MGA, to address the challenges of feature similarity between arable and non-arable areas, insufficient fine-grained feature extraction, and the underutilization of multi-scale information. Specifically, a Multi-Scale Adaptive Segmentation (MSAS) is designed during the feature extraction phase to provide multi-scale and multi-feature information, supporting the model’s feature reconstruction stage. In the reconstruction phase, the introduction of the Multi-Scale Contextual Module (MCM) and Group Aggregation Bridge (GAB) significantly enhances the efficiency and accuracy of multi-scale and fine-grained feature utilization. The experiments conducted on an arable land dataset based on GF-2 imagery and a publicly available dataset show that U-MGA outperforms mainstream networks (Unet, A2FPN, Segformer, FTUnetformer, DCSwin, and TransUnet) across six evaluation metrics (Overall Accuracy (OA), Precision, Recall, F1-score, Intersection-over-Union (IoU), and Kappa coefficient). Thus, this study provides an efficient and precise solution for the arable land recognition task, which is of significant importance for agricultural resource monitoring and ecological environmental protection.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: Accuracy / Agricultural land / Agricultural production / Agricultural resources / Agriculture / Algorithms / Arable land / arable land recognition / attention mechanism / Classification / Computational linguistics / Datasets / Deep learning / Environmental protection / Feature extraction / high-resolution remote sensing imagery / Identification / Image reconstruction / Land area / Land cover / Language processing / lightweight network / Machine learning / Modules / multi-scale information / Natural language interfaces / Natural language processing / Neural networks / Remote sensing / Segmentation / Semantics