A boundary guidance and cross-scale information interaction network for water body extraction from remote sensing images

Extracting accurate water body information holds great significance for water resources protection and urban planning. However, due to numerous surface features and complex environments, along with different morphologies, scales, and spectral characteristics of different water bodies, remote sensing images inevitably exhibit heterogeneity, spectral similarities, and inter-class similarities between water bodies and other surface features. Existing methods fail to fully exploit boundary cues, the semantic correlation between different layers, and multi-scale representations, rendering the accurate information extraction of water bodies from remote sensing images still challenging. This study proposed a boundary guidance and cross-scale information interaction network (BGCIINet) for information extraction of water bodies from remote sensing images. First, this study proposed a boundary guidance (BG) module for the first time by combing the Sobel operator. This module can be used to effectively capture boundary cues in low-level features and efficiently embed these cues into a decoder to produce rich boundary information. Second, a cross-scale information interaction (CII) module was introduced to enhance the multi-scale representation capability of the network and facilitate information exchange between layers. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms four state-of-the-art methods, offering rich boundary details and completeness under challenging scenarios. Therefore, the proposed method is more effective in extracting water body information from remote sensing images. This study will provide a valuable reference of methods for future research.