Extracting Wetland Type Information with a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Wetlands have important ecological value. The application of wetland remote sensing is essential for the timely and accurate analysis of the current situation in wetlands and dynamic changes in wetland resources, but high-resolution remote sensing images display nonobvious boundaries between wetland types. However, high classification accuracy and time efficiency cannot be guaranteed simultaneously. Extraction of wetland type information based on high-spatial-resolution remote sensing images is a bottleneck that has hindered wetland development research and change detection. This paper proposes an automatic and efficient method for extracting wetland type information. First, the object-oriented multiscale segmentation method is used to realize the fine segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images, and then the deep convolutional neural network model AlexNet is used to classify automatically the types of wetland images. The method is verified in a case study involving field-measured data, and the classification results are compared with those of traditional classification methods. The results show that the proposed method can more accurately and efficiently extract different wetland types in high-resolution remote sensing images than the traditional classification methods. The proposed method will be helpful in the extension and application of wetland remote sensing technology and will provide technical support for the protection, development, and utilization of wetland resources.