Pine pest detection using remote sensing satellite images combined with a multi-scale attention-UNet model

Pest monitoring of forest areas is essential to pest control. The existing remote sensing satellite image methods have been widely used in detecting pine wilt disease due to their low cost and large detection range. However, most existing methods for pine wilt disease detection are based on multi-phase remote sensing satellite imagery and use manually designed features or machine learning-based algorithms. This makes these methods time-consuming and does not allow early detection of pest-infested forests and can also lead to further spread of the disease. In addition, machine learning-based algorithms can have poor detection performance and generalization ability. To address these shortcomings, this paper uses the pine forest in the Qingyuan area of Liaoning Province in China as a study area to analyze the physiological characteristics of pine pests based on the aerial photography data collected by a Quadrotor-type unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). By combining these data with the artificial field survey data, the pest-infested areas of forest are marked in the Landsat 8 satellite remote sensing (SRS) images. Further, an end-to-end automatic pest detection framework is designed based on a multi-scale attention-UNet (MA-UNet) model and monophasic images. In addition, the detection performance of the developed model is further optimized using the data augmentation technique to extend the labeled dataset. Compared with the traditional model, the proposed model achieves a much better recall rate of 57.38% in detecting pest-infested forest areas, while the recall rates of the Support Vector Machine (SVM), UNet, attention-UNet, and MedT models are 14.38%, 49.33%, 48.02%, and 33.64%, respectively. According to the results, the proposed model can achieve timely detection and screening of pest-infested forest areas, improving forest management efficiency. • The pine forest in the Qingyuan area of Liaoning Province in China is studied. • The remote sensing satellite and UAV image is used for detecting pine disease. • The optimization of pine disease detection scheme is achieved by deep learning. • A Multi-scale Attention-UNet (MA-UNet) model is proposed to detect pine disease. • Data augmentation technique is introduced to improve the performance of MA-UNet.