WetSegNet: An Edge-Guided Multi-Scale Feature Interaction Network for Wetland Classification

Wetlands play a crucial role in climate regulation, pollutant filtration, and biodiversity conservation. Accurate wetland classification through high-resolution remote sensing imagery is pivotal for the scientific management, ecological monitoring, and sustainable development of these ecosystems. However, the intricate spatial details in such imagery pose significant challenges to conventional interpretation techniques, necessitating precise boundary extraction and multi-scale contextual modeling. In this study, we propose WetSegNet, an edge-guided Multi-Scale Feature Interaction network for wetland classification, which integrates a convolutional neural network (CNN) and Swin Transformer within a U-Net architecture to synergize local texture perception and global semantic comprehension. Specifically, the framework incorporates two novel components: (1) a Multi-Scale Feature Interaction (MFI) module employing cross-attention mechanisms to mitigate semantic discrepancies between encoder–decoder features, and (2) a Multi-Feature Fusion (MFF) module that hierarchically enhances boundary delineation through edge-guided spatial attention (EGA). Experimental validation on GF-2 satellite imagery of Dongting Lake wetlands demonstrates that WetSegNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an overall accuracy (OA) of 90.81% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.88. Notably, it achieves classification accuracies exceeding 90% for water, sedge, and reed habitats, surpassing the baseline U-Net by 3.3% in overall accuracy and 0.05 in Kappa. The proposed model effectively addresses heterogeneous wetland classification challenges, validating its capability to reconcile local–global feature representation.