ISWSST: Index-space-wave State Superposition Transformers for Multispectral Remotely Sensed Imagery Semantic Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces ISWSST, a novel Transformer model inspired by quantum mechanics, that enhances multispectral remote sensing image segmentation by superposing multiple states and employing a lossless wavelet encoder-decoder.

Contribution

The paper proposes the first quantum-inspired superposition Transformer for MSRSI segmentation, integrating index, space, and wave states for improved accuracy and edge preservation.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in segmentation accuracy

Effectively preserves edges with wavelet-based encoder-decoder

Enhances multispectral feature extraction using attention mechanisms

Abstract

Currently the semantic segmentation task of multispectral remotely sensed imagery (MSRSI) faces the following problems: 1) Usually, only single domain feature (i.e., space domain or frequency domain) is considered; 2) downsampling operation in encoder generally leads to the accuracy loss of edge extraction; 3) multichannel features of MSRSI are not fully considered; and 4) prior knowledge of remote sensing is not fully utilized. To solve the aforementioned issues, an index-space-wave state superposition Transformer (ISWSST) is the first to be proposed for MSRSI semantic segmentation by the inspiration from quantum mechanics, whose superiority is as follows: 1) index, space and wave states are superposed or fused to simulate quantum superposition by adaptively voting decision (i.e., ensemble learning idea) for being a stronger classifier and improving the segmentation accuracy; 2) a lossless wavelet pyramid encoder-decoder module is designed to losslessly reconstruct image and simulate quantum entanglement based on wavelet transform and inverse wavelet transform for avoiding the edge extraction loss; 3) combining multispectral features (i.e. remote sensing index and channel attention mechanism) is proposed to accurately extract ground objects from original resolution images; and 4) quantum mechanics are introduced to interpret the underlying superiority of ISWSST. Experiments show that ISWSST is validated and superior to the state-of-the-art architectures for the MSRSI segmentation task, which improves the segmentation and edge extraction accuracy effectively. Codes will be available publicly after our paper is accepted.