Anisotropic Green Tide Patch Information Extraction Based on Deformable Convolution

Green tides are marine disasters caused by the explosive proliferation or high concentration of certain large algae in seawater, which causes discoloration of the water body. Accurate monitoring of its distribution area is highly important for early warning and the protection of marine ecology. However, existing deep learning methods have difficulty in effectively identifying green tides with anisotropic characteristics due to the complex and variable shapes of the patches and the wide range of scales. To address this issue, this paper presents an anisotropic green tide patch extraction network (AGE-Net) based on deformable convolution. The main structure of AGE-Net consists of stacked anisotropic feature extraction (AFEB) modules. Each AFEB module contains two branches for extracting green tide patches. The first branch consists of multiple connected dense blocks. The second branch introduces a deformable convolution module and a depth residual module based on a multiresolution feature extraction network for extracting anisotropic features of green tide patches. Finally, an irregular green tide patch feature enhancement module is used to fuse the high-level semantic features extracted from the two branches. To verify the effectiveness of the AGE-Net model, experiments were conducted on the MODIS Green Tide dataset. The results show that AGE-Net has better recognition performance, with F1-scores and IoUs reaching 0.8317 and 71.19% on multi-view test images, outperforming other comparison methods.