CACPU-Net: Channel attention U-net constrained by point features for crop type mapping

Crop type mapping is an indispensable topic in the agricultural field and plays an important role in agricultural intelligence. In crop type mapping, most studies focus on time series models. However, in our experimental area, the images of the crop harvest stage can be obtained from single temporal remote sensing images. Only using single temporal data for crop type mapping can reduce the difficulty of dataset production. In addition, the model of single temporal crop type mapping can also extract the spatial features of crops more effectively. In this work, we linked crop type mapping with 2D semantic segmentation and designed CACPU-Net based on single-source and single-temporal autumn Sentinel-2 satellite images. First, we used a shallow convolutional neural network, U-Net, and introduced channel attention mechanism to improve the model's ability to extract spectral features. Second, we presented the Dice to compute loss together with cross-entropy to mitigate the effects of crop class imbalance. In addition, we designed the CP module to additionally focus on hard-to-classify pixels. Our experiment was conducted on BeiDaHuang YouYi of Heilongjiang Province, which mainly grows rice, corn, soybean, and other economic crops. On the dataset we collected, through the 10-fold cross-validation experiment under the 8:1:1 dataset splitting scheme, our method achieved 93.74% overall accuracy, higher than state-of-the-art models. Compared with the previous model, our improved model has higher classification accuracy on the parcel boundary. This study provides an effective end-to-end method and a new research idea for crop type mapping. The code and the trained model are available on https://github.com/mooneed/CACPU-Net.