SDGSAT-1 Cloud Detection Algorithm Based On RDE-SegNeXt

This paper proposes an efficient cloud detection algorithm for Sustainable Development Scientific Satellite (SDGSAT-1) data. The core work includes the following: (1) constructing a SDGSAT-1 cloud detection dataset containing five types of elements: clouds, cloud shadow, snow, water body, and land, with a total of 15,000 samples; (2) designing a multi-scale convolutional attention unit (RDE-MSCA) based on a gated linear unit (GLU), with parallel re-parameterized convolution (RepConv) and detail-enhanced convolution (DEConv). This design focuses on improving the feature representation and edge detail capture capabilities of targets such as clouds, cloud shadow, and snow. Specifically, the RepConv branch focuses on learning a new global representation, reconstructing the original multi-branch deep convolution into a single-branch structure that can efficiently fuse channel features, reducing computational and memory overhead. The DEConv branch, on the other hand, uses differential convolution to enhance the extraction of high-frequency information, and is equivalent to a normal convolution in the form of re-parameterization during the inference stage without additional overhead; GLU then realizes adaptive channel-level information regulation during the multi-branch fusion process, which further enhances the model’s discriminative power for easily confused objects. It is integrated into the SegNeXt architecture based on RDE-MSCA and proposed as RDE-SegNeXt. Experiments show that this model can achieve 71.85% mIoU on the SDGSAT-1 dataset with only about 1/12 the computational complexity of the Swin-L model (a 2.71% improvement over Swin-L and a 5.26% improvement over the benchmark SegNeXt-T). It also significantly improves the detection of clouds, cloud shadow, and snow. It achieved competitive results on both the 38-Cloud and LoveDA public datasets, verifying its effectiveness and versatility.