Extraction of rice and shrimp co-cultivation farming fields using edge-assisted segmentation network

Rice shrimp co-cultivation, as a circular agriculture model that integrates ecological, economic, and social benefits, has been widely applied in China. Accurately obtaining information on the planting area, spatial distribution, and changes of rice shrimp co-cultivation is of great significance for ensuring safe production, social supply of rice and shrimp, and formulating corresponding management and planning policies by government departments. Most of the existing methods for extracting rice shrimp farming fields used medium-resolution temporal images as data sources to analyze the characteristics of water or vegetation changes within a year to construct models. The accuracy of the extraction depended on the results of water or vegetation analysis, the boundaries were unclear and there was a lot of noise. To solve the problems of complex temporal analysis, low accuracy of extraction results, and incomplete boundaries in existing extraction methods, this paper used high-resolution images of a single temporal phase as the data source, without analyzing the temporal features of rice shrimp farming fields. Only the spatial features of rice shrimp farming fields on high-resolution images were used for high-precision extraction. We proposed a deep learning semantic segmentation model named EASNet (edge assisted segmentation network), which was mainly composed of three modules: feature extraction module (FE Module), edge assist module (EA Module), and information fusion Module (IF Module). The FE Module was used to extract multi-level and fused contextual semantic information features of the target object. The EA module used the unique edge "shrimp groove" of rice and shrimp farming fields as an auxiliary information for separate segmentation in the designed EA Module. The IF Module integrated the outputs of the FE Module and the EA Module, enabling the main task to not only enhanced the boundary structure information of rice shrimp farming fields but also learned the unique spatial and semantic information of rice shrimp farming fields. The experimental results showed that with the enhancement of the EA Module, the segmentation results of rice shrimp farming fields were more complete and the boundaries were clearer. The IoU (Intersection over Union) of semantic accuracy and the F1-Score of boundary accuracy were improved by 1.5% and 5.8%, respectively. The recall, IoU, and F1-Score of overall semantic accuracy reached 0.970, 0.964, and 0.930, respectively. The Recall and F1-Score of boundary accuracy reached 0.864 and 0.859, while the Recall and F1-Score of relaxed boundary accuracy reached 0.876 and 0.913. The trained EASNet model was applied to the whole area of Xuyi County, and the spatial distribution map of rice shrimp farming fields in Xuyi County in 2020 was obtained. In comparison with the results of rice shrimp breeding fields extracted by the traditional Water Seasonal Difference method and the Random Forest method, our method obtained the optimal results with an OA(overall accuracy) of 96.71% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.934. The method used in this paper has higher accuracy, lower missing rate, more regular boundaries, and fewer instances of similar integration in extracting results. It can provide a basis for natural resource surveys, and government departments to formulate corresponding rice shrimp breeding management and planning policies.