ISWSST: Index-space-wave State Superposition Transformers for Multispectral Remotely Sensed Imagery Semantic Segmentation

Currently the semantic segmentation task of multispectral remotely sensed imagery (MSRSI) faces the following problems: 1) Usually, only single domain feature (i.e., space domain or frequency domain) is considered; 2) downsampling operation in encoder generally leads to the accuracy loss of edge extraction; 3) multichannel features of MSRSI are not fully considered; and 4) prior knowledge of remote sensing is not fully utilized. To solve the aforementioned issues, an index-space-wave state superposition Transformer (ISWSST) is the first to be proposed for MSRSI semantic segmentation by the inspiration from quantum mechanics, whose superiority is as follows: 1) index, space and wave states are superposed or fused to simulate quantum superposition by adaptively voting decision (i.e., ensemble learning idea) for being a stronger classifier and improving the segmentation accuracy; 2) a lossless wavelet pyramid encoder-decoder module is designed to losslessly reconstruct image and simulate quantum entanglement based on wavelet transform and inverse wavelet transform for avoiding the edge extraction loss; 3) combining multispectral features (i.e. remote sensing index and channel attention mechanism) is proposed to accurately extract ground objects from original resolution images; and 4) quantum mechanics are introduced to interpret the underlying superiority of ISWSST. Experiments show that ISWSST is validated and superior to the state-of-the-art architectures for the MSRSI segmentation task, which improves the segmentation and edge extraction accuracy effectively. Codes will be available publicly after our paper is accepted.

Chang Li, Pengfei Zhang, Yu Wang · 2024