LENet: A Semantic Segmentation Network for Complex Landforms in Remote Sensing Imagery via Axial Semantic Modeling and Deformation-Aware Compensation

Accurate semantic segmentation of complex landforms in remote sensing imagery is hindered by pronounced intra-class heterogeneity, blurred boundaries, and irregular geomorphic structures. To overcome these challenges, this study presents LENet (Landforms Expert Segmentation Net), a novel segmentation network that combines axial semantic modeling with deformation-aware compensation. LENet follows an encoder–decoder framework, where the decoder integrates three key modules: the Expert Enhancement Block (EEBlock) for capturing long-range dependencies along axial directions; the Feature Expert Compensator (FEC) employing deformable convolutions with channel–spatial decoupled weights to emphasize ambiguous intra-class regions; and the Cross-Sparse Attention (CSA) mechanism that suppresses background noise via multi-rate sparsity masks and enhances intra-class consistency through cosine-similarity weighting. Experiments conducted on the PKLD plateau karst and GVLM landslide datasets demonstrate that LENet achieves IoU scores of 70.39% and 80.95% and Recall values of 83.33% and 91.38%, surpassing eight state-of-the-art methods. These results confirm that LENet effectively balances global contextual understanding and local detail refinement, providing a robust and accurate solution for complex landform segmentation in remote sensing imagery.