Intelligent classification of water bodies with different turbidity levels based on Gaofen-1 multispectral imagery

The turbidity of water is crucial for the health of river and lake ecosystems, necessitating efficient monitoring for effective water management. Existing methods for studying water turbidity's spatial and temporal distribution rely mostly on measured data. There is limited research on the classification of water bodies with different turbidity levels. The main challenge lies in determining the boundaries of liquid water bodies at various turbidity levels, making it challenging to classify them accurately using traditional remote sensing image classification methods. This paper proposes and validates an intelligent turbidity classification method based on deep learning using GaoFen-1 multispectral remote sensing imagery. An adaptive threshold water extraction method based on the Normalized Difference Water Index is proposed to capture water boundaries more accurately to improve the accuracy of extracting nearshore water bodies. A semi-automatic semantic annotation method for water turbidity is introduced to reduce manual labeling costs. The paper applies mode filtering to address edge noise issues and establishes a high-quality training sample dataset. After comparing the accuracy of various neural network models, DeepLab V3+ is selected for intelligent turbidity classification. The results show high accuracy, with mean intersection over union (MIoU), mean F1 score (MF1), and overall accuracy (OA) reaching 94.73%, 97.29%, and 97.54%, respectively. The proposed method and experiments demonstrate the feasibility of intelligent classification of water bodies with different turbidity levels using deep learning networks. This provides a new approach for large-scale and efficient remote sensing water turbidity monitoring.