A spectrum-enhanced attention model for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images

Abstract

Semantic segmentation of remote sensing images (RSIs) is essential for applications such as environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster management. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and their variants struggle to capture comprehensive spectral context for learning discriminative representations. In this paper, we propose a Spectrum-Enhanced Network (SPENet) that leverages the Frequency Transformer Block (FTB) to capture rich spectral context. FTB integrates Spectrum-Enhanced Attention (SEA) with Multi-Head Frequency Self-Attention (MH-FSA), incorporating more informative contextual cues. Specifically, SEA aggregates spectral statistics through covariance matrix normalization before applying channel-wise attention. By projecting feature maps onto the frequency domain, MH-FSA provides the network with a broader context, extending beyond the low-frequency focus of standard self-attention mechanisms. Extensive experiments on the ISPRS Potsdam and LoveDA datasets show that SPENet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Besides, the proposed SEA module notably rises average F1-score/overall accuracy/mean insert over union wiht more than 2.5/2.6%/2.3%, as demonstrated by ablation study.