Work

DCA-UNet for Landslide Segmentation with Deformable Convolution and Aggregated Attention

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Accurate delineation of landslide boundaries from remote sensing imagery remains challenging because landslides exhibit irregular geometry, substantial scale variation, and strong background interference. We propose DCA-UNet, a U-Net-style segmentation network that integrates deformable convolution and aggregated attention to jointly improve geometric adaptation and local-global context modeling. Deformable convolution adjusts spatial sampling locations to irregular landslide boundaries, whereas aggregated attention enhances contextual discrimination in visually ambiguous terrain. We evaluate the method on three public benchmarks—Landslide4Sense, HR-GLDD, and GDCLD—under a controlled from-scratch benchmark with dataset-specific preprocessing and official data splits. DCA-UNet achieves the best overall IoU/F1 ranking across the three datasets, reaching 61.92%/76.48% on Landslide4Sense, 59.24%/74.41% on HR-GLDD, and 58.40%/73.74% on GDCLD. The model contains 29.50 million parameters, which is close to vanilla U-Net and substantially fewer than several transformer-based baselines, although its training-side runtime and memory consumption are not the lowest. These results show that combining adaptive spatial sampling with local-global contextual aggregation is effective for landslide segmentation in both multispectral and RGB remote sensing imagery.

Source: Remote Sensing

DOI: 10.3390/rs18122000