RCTUnet: a deep learning model for crop-residue-soil image segmentation and crop residue cover extraction

Accurate quantification of crop residue cover (CRC) is crucial for monitoring and evaluating conservation tillage practices, yet it poses a significant image segmentation challenge. The subtle visual distinctions between fragmented residue and soil, compounded by variable illumination and shadows in field imagery, often lead to poor segmentation performance. To overcome these limitations, we introduce RCTUnet, a novel deep learning architecture designed for robust crop-residue-soil segmentation and precise CRC estimation. RCTUnet's architecture synergistically integrates three key components: (1) a ResNet50 backbone for deep, multi-scale feature extraction; (2) a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to adaptively focus on salient residue features across both channel and spatial dimensions; and (3) a transformer-based global context fusion module (GCFM) to model long-range spatial dependencies, which is critical for interpreting heterogeneous residue patterns. We evaluated RCTUnet on a dataset of 1220 field-acquired images spanning four typical crop rotations. Experimental results show that, compared to traditional models: (1) RCTUnet achieves significantly higher crop-residue-soil segmentation accuracy than classic models including Unet, Unet++, DeepLabV3, segmentation network (SegNet), and fully convolutional network (FCN), with improvements of 3.24%, 3.42%, 4.88%, 8.28%, and 6.05% in overall accuracy, respectively; (2) RCTUnet yields superior residue-soil segmentation performance, with increases in residue recall of 7.67%, 7.37%, 14.09%, 27.05%, and 16.91%, respectively; (3) RCTUnet shows enhanced CRC estimation accuracy, achieving a root mean square error (RMSE) of 4.875, representing a 45.5% improvement over Unet (RMSE=8.941). These results demonstrate the efficacy of our hybrid approach, which combines deep hierarchical features, dual-domain attention, and global context modeling. RCTUnet provides a robust and reliable tool for automated CRC assessment, advancing the capabilities of in-field agricultural monitoring.