In the coastal areas of China, the eutrophication of seawater leads to the continuous occurrence of red tide, which has caused great damage to Marine fisheries and aquatic resources. Therefore, the detection and prediction of red tide have important research significance. The rapid development of optical remote sensing technology and deep-learning technology provides technical means for realizing large-scale and high-precision red tide detection. However, the difficulty of the accurate detection of red tide edges with complex boundaries limits the further improvement of red tide detection accuracy. In view of the above problems, this paper takes GOCI data in the East China Sea as an example and proposes an improved U-Net red tide detection method. In the improved U-Net method, NDVI was introduced to enhance the characteristic information of the red tide to improve the separability between the red tide and seawater. At the same time, the ECA channel attention mechanism was introduced to give different weights according to the influence of different bands on red tide detection, and the spectral characteristics of different channels were fully mined to further extract red tide characteristics. A shallow feature extraction module based on Atrous Spatial Pyramid Convolution (ASPC) was designed to improve the U-Net model. The red tide feature information in a multi-scale context was fused under multiple sampling rates to enhance the model's ability to extract features at different scales. The problem of limited accuracy improvement in red tide edge detection with complex boundaries is solved via the fusion of deep and shallow features and multi-scale spatial features. Compared with other methods, the method proposed in this paper achieves better results and can detect red tide edges with complex boundaries, and the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score are 95.90%, 97.15%, 91.53%, and 0.94, respectively. In addition, the red tide detection experiments in other regions with relatively concentrated distribution also prove that the method has good applicability.
Keywords: ASPC; ECA; GOCI; U-Net; complex boundary; red tide.