DCA-UNet for Landslide Segmentation with Deformable Convolution and Aggregated Attention

Accurate delineation of landslide boundaries from remote sensing imagery remains challenging because landslides exhibit irregular geometry, substantial scale variation, and strong background interference. We propose DCA-UNet, a U-Net-style segmentation network that integrates deformable convolution and aggregated attention to jointly improve geometric adaptation and local-global context modeling. Deformable convolution adjusts spatial sampling locations to irregular landslide boundaries, whereas aggregated attention enhances contextual discrimination in visually ambiguous terrain. We evaluate the method on three public benchmarks—Landslide4Sense, HR-GLDD, and GDCLD—under a controlled from-scratch benchmark with dataset-specific preprocessing and official data splits. DCA-UNet achieves the best overall IoU/F1 ranking across the three datasets, reaching 61.92%/76.48% on Landslide4Sense, 59.24%/74.41% on HR-GLDD, and 58.40%/73.74% on GDCLD. The model contains 29.50 million parameters, which is close to vanilla U-Net and substantially fewer than several transformer-based baselines, although its training-side runtime and memory consumption are not the lowest. These results show that combining adaptive spatial sampling with local-global contextual aggregation is effective for landslide segmentation in both multispectral and RGB remote sensing imagery.

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Publication Details

Journal
Remote Sensing
Published
2026-06-16
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18122000
Primary Topic
Landslides and related hazards
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

DCA-UNet for Landslide Segmentation with Deformable Convolution and Aggregated Attention

Shiluo Xu, Yingxu Song, S. W. Li, C W Wang et al.
Remote Sensing
Landslides and related hazards
article

DCA-UNet for Landslide Segmentation with Deformable Convolution and Aggregated Attention

Shiluo Xu, Yingxu Song, S. W. Li, C W Wang, Yingcong Huang, Qi Li, Run Wang, Yujia Zou, Hui Chen, Weicheng Wu, Xiangyan Kong, Jie Luo, Zuohua Tang, Yuan Li
article en

Abstract

Accurate delineation of landslide boundaries from remote sensing imagery remains challenging because landslides exhibit irregular geometry, substantial scale variation, and strong background interference. We propose DCA-UNet, a U-Net-style segmentation network that integrates deformable convolution and aggregated attention to jointly improve geometric adaptation and local-global context modeling. Deformable convolution adjusts spatial sampling locations to irregular landslide boundaries, whereas aggregated attention enhances contextual discrimination in visually ambiguous terrain. We evaluate the method on three public benchmarks—Landslide4Sense, HR-GLDD, and GDCLD—under a controlled from-scratch benchmark with dataset-specific preprocessing and official data splits. DCA-UNet achieves the best overall IoU/F1 ranking across the three datasets, reaching 61.92%/76.48% on Landslide4Sense, 59.24%/74.41% on HR-GLDD, and 58.40%/73.74% on GDCLD. The model contains 29.50 million parameters, which is close to vanilla U-Net and substantially fewer than several transformer-based baselines, although its training-side runtime and memory consumption are not the lowest. These results show that combining adaptive spatial sampling with local-global contextual aggregation is effective for landslide segmentation in both multispectral and RGB remote sensing imagery.

Remote SensingVol. 18(12)
China Geological Survey (CN), Huzhou Normal University (CN), National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing (CN), China Metallurgical Geology Bureau (CN), Xinjiang Institute of Engineering (CN), Hubei Provincial Water Resources and Hydropower Planning Survey and Design Institute (CN), East China University of Technology (CN), Geological Exploration Institute of Shandong Zhengyuan (CN)
Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province
Peace, Justice and strong institutions, Reduced inequalities
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Landslides and related hazards
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