Landslide detection using multimodal data fusion and an improved Deeplabv3+ model

Accurate and efficient detection of landslide hazards is recognized as a critical requirement for both disaster emergency response and long-term land-use planning. However, conventional semantic segmentation models still present notable limitations when processing high-resolution remote sensing imagery, such as imprecise delineation of landslide boundaries and low performance in detecting small-scale landslides, often resulting in missed or false detections. To address these challenges, this study proposes FCA-DeepLab, a novel landslide detection model based on multimodal data fusion and an improved DeepLabv3 + architecture. The model integrates a multimodal fusion mechanism to achieve deep coupling of optical imagery and topographic features, thereby fully exploiting both visual and geomorphological contextual information related to landslides. Moreover, the conventional ResNet backbone is replaced with a ConvNeXt network employing 7 × 7 convolutional kernels, which substantially enlarges the receptive field and improves the ability to capture fine-grained features. A small‑object attention mechanism specifically designed for small targets is introduced to enhance sensitivity to subtle landslide characteristics and markedly reduce the missed detection rate. Comparative experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that FCA-DeepLab surpasses established semantic segmentation models such as UNet, Swin Transformer, SegFormer, and the original DeepLabv3 + in terms of overall accuracy, recall, and qualitative segmentation performance. Furthermore, additional evaluation on the Bijie landslide dataset confirms the model's strong generalization capability, showing adaptability to diverse regions, complex terrains, and varied scenarios. These findings substantiate the proposed method's significant advantages in improving detection accuracy, reducing false positives, and strengthening the identification of small-scale landslides, thereby providing a reliable technical reference for deep learning-based intelligent landslide detection.