Shape-Constrained ResU-Net for Old Landslides Detection in the Loess Plateau

The Loess Plateau is highly susceptible to landslides due to its fragile geological structure and frequent human activities, particularly old landslides with historical structural damage. The features of these landslides in remote sensing images become blurred over time, leading to huge challenges in detection. Considering that old landslides exhibit obvious shape characteristics, we propose ResU-SPMNet, a deep learning model that integrates shape characteristics into the baseline ResU-Net. The proposed model consists of three components: ResU-Net, shape prior module (SPM), and the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module, which jointly enhance segmentation performance from the perspectives of shape constraints and multi-scale feature representation. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, old landslides in representative regions of the Loess Plateau were selected as the study targets. Results show that the proposed model outperforms ResU-Net, SegNet, MultiResUnet, and DeepLabv3+ in old landslide segmentation, achieving an F1-score of 0.6669 and an MCC of 0.6167. Moreover, generalization tests conducted in independent regions indicate that the model exhibits strong robustness across different seasons. The best performance is achieved in summer, whereas performance declines in winter due to adverse factors such as reduced illumination and snow or ice cover.