Detecting Burned Vegetation Areas by Merging Spectral and Texture Features in a ResNet Deep Learning Architecture

Timely and accurate detection of burned areas is crucial for assessing fire damage and contributing to ecosystem recovery efforts. In this study, we propose a framework for detecting fire-affected vegetation anomalies on the basis of a ResNet deep learning (DL) algorithm by merging spectral and textural features (ResNet-IST) and the vegetation abnormal spectral texture index (VASTI). To train the ResNet-IST, a vegetation anomaly dataset was constructed on high-resolution 30 m fire-affected remote sensing images selected from the Global Fire Atlas (GFA) to extract the spectral and textural features. We tested the model to detect fire-affected vegetation in ten study areas across four continents. The experimental results demonstrated that the ResNet-IST outperformed the VASTI by approximately 3% in terms of anomaly detection accuracy and achieved a 5–15% improvement in the detection of the normalized burn ratio (NBR). Furthermore, the accuracy of the VASTI was significantly greater than that of NBR for burn detection, indicating that the merging of spectral and textural features provides complementary advantages, leading to stronger classification performance than the use of SFs alone. Our results suggest that deep learning outperforms traditional mathematical models in burned vegetation anomaly detection tasks. Nevertheless, the scope and applicability of this study are somewhat limited, which also provides directions for future research.