Monitoring Pine Wilt Disease Using High-Resolution Satellite Remote Sensing at the Single-Tree Scale with Integrated Self-Attention

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Pine wilt disease has caused severe damage to China’s forest ecosystems. Utilizing the rich information from very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery for large-scale and accurate monitoring of pine wilt disease is a crucial approach to curbing its spread. However, current research on identifying infected trees using VHR satellite imagery and deep learning remains extremely limited. This study introduces several advanced self-attention algorithms into the task of satellite-based monitoring of pine wilt disease to enhance detection performance. We constructed a dataset of discolored pine trees affected by pine wilt disease using imagery from the Gaofen-2 and Gaofen-7 satellites. Within the unified semantic segmentation framework MMSegmentation, we implemented four single-head attention models—NLNet, CCNet, DANet, and GCNet—and two multi-head attention models—Swin Transformer and SegFormer—for the accurate semantic segmentation of infected trees. The model predictions were further analyzed through visualization. The results demonstrate that introducing appropriate self-attention algorithms significantly improves detection accuracy for pine wilt disease. Among the single-head attention models, DANet achieved the highest accuracy, reaching 73.35%. The multi-head attention models exhibited an excellent performance, with SegFormer-b2 achieving an accuracy of 76.39%, learning the features of discolored pine trees at the earliest stage and converging faster. The visualization of model inference results indicates that DANet, which integrates convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with self-attention mechanisms, achieved the highest overall accuracy at 94.43%. The use of self-attention algorithms enables models to extract more precise morphological features of discolored pine trees, enhancing user accuracy while potentially reducing production accuracy.