Addressing Fine-Grained Lake Water Body Extraction: A Hybrid Approach Combining Vision Transformer and Geodesic Active Contour

In remote sensing image analyses, the extraction of lake water bodies has been emphasized owing to its pivotal role in interpreting aquatic ecosystems, assessing hydrological trends, and detecting environmental changes. Although deep-learning-based techniques have been effectively deployed for this task, several challenges persist, including mis-segmentation of low-contrast regions, insufficient delineation of fuzzy boundaries, and over-segmentation in micro-regions. To address these issues, an innovative, end-to-end segmentation framework is proposed in this study. This framework ingeniously integrates the geodesic active contour (GAC) model with the vision transformer (ViT) architecture, thereby offering a robust solution for fain-gained lake water body extraction. Specifically, the conventional GAC model is first revisited and reformulated. Subsequently, the differentiable spectral clustering (DSC) module is designed for automatic contour initialization and lifts the dependence on hard threshold binarization. Finally, an iterative learning strategy is introduced to integrate the aforementioned models within the ViT architecture. This strategy serves to constrain the geometric characteristics, while also permitting dynamic adjustment of evolution parameters, facilitating enhanced refinement of spatial details and accuracy in segmentation results. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the newly constructed Global Lake View (GLV) dataset and a public benchmark demonstrated that the proposed method yields precise lake boundaries and achieves state-of-the-art performance.