Clustering Feature Constraint Multiscale Attention Network for Shadow Extraction From Remote Sensing Images

Shadow extraction is an important and challenging task in remote sensing image analysis because the presence of shadows not only reduces radiation information but also affects the interpretation of remote sensing images. In this article, a clustering feature constraint multiscale attention network for shadow extraction from remote sensing images is proposed. First, in addition to the pixel-level description of the traditional neural network, our method focuses on the clustering relationships between pixel pairs to obtain the pixel group features of shadows. The feature extraction capability of the network is improved with a reweighting mechanism at the pixel level and pixel group features. Second, we employ a feature fusion algorithm by considering contextual information to improve the network’s attention toward shadow areas and enhance the nonlinear expression ability during the encoding and decoding layers. Furthermore, considering the most prominent multiscale features of shadows in remote sensing images, a deep multiscale feature aggregation structure is established to better fit the multiscale feature expression of shadows. Finally, we construct a shadow extraction dataset to verify the proposed approach. We compare our method with the results of state-of-the-art deep learning models. The results show that the intersection over union (IOU) of our method is improved by 0.85%–9.51% and that the F1 -score is improved by 0.73–6.48. In addition, the test results for images with different resolutions prove that the proposed approach is more robust than the other methods.