Fast Tailings Pond Mapping Exploiting Large Scene Remote Sensing Images by Coupling Scene Classification and Sematic Segmentation Models

In the process of extracting tailings ponds from large scene remote sensing images, semantic segmentation models usually perform calculations on all small-size remote sensing images segmented by the sliding window method. However, some of these small-size remote sensing images do not have tailings ponds, and their calculations not only affect the model accuracy, but also affect the model speed. For this problem, we proposed a fast tailings pond extraction method (Scene-Classification-Sematic-Segmentation, SC-SS) that couples scene classification and semantic segmentation models. The method can map tailings ponds rapidly and accurately in large scene remote sensing images. There were two parts in the method: a scene classification model, and a semantic segmentation model. Among them, the scene classification model adopted the lightweight network MobileNetv2. With the help of this network, the scenes containing tailings ponds can be quickly screened out from the large scene remote sensing images, and the interference of scenes without tailings ponds can be reduced. The semantic segmentation model used the U-Net model to finely segment objects from the tailings pond scenes. In addition, the encoder of the U-Net model was replaced by the VGG16 network with stronger feature extraction ability, which improves the model’s accuracy. In this paper, the Google Earth images of Luanping County were used to create the tailings pond scene classification dataset and tailings pond semantic segmentation dataset, and based on these datasets, the training and testing of models were completed. According to the experimental results, the extraction accuracy (Intersection Over Union, IOU) of the SC-SS model was 93.48%. The extraction accuracy of IOU was 15.12% higher than the U-Net model, while the extraction time was shortened by 35.72%. This research is of great importance to the remote sensing dynamic observation of tailings ponds on a large scale.