Landslide Detection Based on ResU-Net with Transformer and CBAM Embedded: Two Examples with Geologically Different Environments

An efficient method of landslide detection can provide basic scientific data for emergency command and landslide susceptibility mapping. Compared to a traditional landslide detection approach, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been proven to have powerful capabilities in reducing the time consumed for selecting the appropriate features for landslides. Currently, the success of transformers in natural language processing (NLP) demonstrates the strength of self-attention in global semantic information acquisition. How to effectively integrate transformers into CNN, alleviate the limitation of the receptive field, and improve the model generation are hot topics in remote sensing image processing based on deep learning (DL). Inspired by the vision transformer (ViT), this paper first attempts to integrate a transformer into ResU-Net for landslide detection tasks with small datasets, aiming to enhance the network ability in modelling the global context of feature maps and drive the model to recognize landslides with a small dataset. Besides, a spatial and channel attention module was introduced into the decoder to effectually suppress the noise in the feature maps from the convolution and transformer. By selecting two landslide datasets with different geological characteristics, the feasibility of the proposed model was validated. Finally, the standard ResU-Net was chosen as the benchmark to evaluate the proposed model rationality. The results indicated that the proposed model obtained the highest mIoU and F1-score in both datasets, demonstrating that the ResU-Net with a transformer embedded can be used as a robust landslide detection method and thus realize the generation of accurate regional landslide inventory and emergency rescue.