Geological Remote Sensing Interpretation Using Deep Learning Feature and an Adaptive Multisource Data Fusion Network

Geological remote sensing interpretation can extract elements of interest from multiple types of images, which is vital in geological survey and mapping, especially in inaccessible regions. However, due to numerous classes, high interclass similarities, complex distributions, and sample imbalances of geological elements, the interpretation results of machine-learning (ML)-based methods are understandably worse than manual visual interpretation. Additionally, scholars in remote sensing have mainly carried out their works to interpret a single geological element category, such as mineral, lithological, soil and structure. The interpretation of multiple geological elements is missing, which is more in line with the open world. To improve the interpretation results of ML-based methods and reduce the labor cost in geological survey and mapping, we propose a deep-learning (DL)-feature-based adaptive multi-source data fusion network (AMSDFNet) for the efficient interpretation of multiple geological remote sensing elements. The AMSDFNet has two branches for learning valuable spatial and spectral information from two kinds of data sources, wherein the atrous spatial pyramid pooling operation and an attention block are applied to adaptively extract and fuse multi-scale informative features. A hard example mining algorithm was also added to select important training examples to address sample imbalance. A large-scale region in western China with sufficient geological elements was set as the research area. The proposed model improved the two critical metrics by more than 2% in the experiment section. As far as we know, this research work is the first time DL features and multi-source remote sensing images have been utilized to simultaneously interpret geological elements of lithology, soil, surface water, and glaciers. The extensive experimental results demonstrated the superiority of DL features and our model in geological remote sensing interpretation.