Advancing landslide recognition through multi-dimensional feature fusion and transformer architectures

Abstract Landslides are a type of sudden and highly destructive geological hazard. Traditional detection methods often suffer from delayed response and low efficiency. In recent years, deep learning-based object detection techniques have attracted increasing attention in disaster recognition tasks, particularly transformer-based detection models, which exhibit significant advantages in global feature modeling. However, landslide targets in remote sensing imagery often present challenges such as large-scale variation, blurred boundaries, and texture interference. To address these issues, this study proposes an improved detection algorithm based on the RT-DETR-r18 framework by integrating multiple specialized modules. First, the DDC3 module is designed to enhance the recognition of fine boundaries and local textures, thereby improving the feature extraction capacity of the backbone network. Second, an Efficient Additive Attention (EAA) mechanism is introduced to suppress redundant information and strengthen the model's focus on critical regions, improving detection precision. Finally, the CGAFusion module is employed, which utilizes a triple-attention strategy to collaboratively regulate feature weights. This module enhances the model’s ability to filter salient features while preserving global contextual information, leading to more accurate landslide edge detection. A dual-class dataset comprising landslides and storms is constructed from multi-source imagery for evaluation. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing models in several dimensions including mAP@0. 5 and F1 score, demonstrating strong detection accuracy. Code is available at https: //github. com/sanyauChenCoder/Landslide₀2. git.