AIS-PVT: Long-Time AIS Data Assisted Pyramid Vision Transformer for Sea-Land Segmentation in Dual-Polarization SAR Imagery

Traditional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image sea-land segmentation algorithms overlook the ship distribution priori-information provided by the automatic identification system (AIS) data, resulting in poor segmentation performance in complex environments such as ports, marine wetlands, beaches, and other sea-land boundaries. To address the above issues, this article comprehensively uses dual-polarization (VV and VH) SAR images and AIS data as the data source, and it specifically proposes a novel pyramid vision transformer (PVT) assisted by the long-time AIS data (AIS-PVT) for sea-land segmentation. AIS-PVT is the first attempt to integrate the ship distribution density priori-information, provided by the long-time AIS data, into the PVT network, thus the multiscale features of the sea and land can be better distinguished. In the decoding stage, we design a feature filter module (FFM). It aggregates features separately along two spatial directions from the skip connections, enhancing the representation of objects of interest while reducing the influence of redundant information. Furthermore, we develop a boundary-pixel-aware function to steer the model training process, allowing AIS-PVT to concentrate more on the neighborhood information of boundary pixels. Importantly, the AIS-PVT method captures global multiscale information and enhances the model’s data fusion capability. The conclusive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach in sea-land segmentation tasks, outperforming other state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques.