An Approach for Detecting Mangrove Areas and Mapping Species Using Multispectral Drone Imagery and Deep Learning

Mangrove ecosystems are important in tropical and subtropical coastal zones, contributing to marine biodiversity and maintaining marine ecological balance. It is cru-cial to develop more efficient, intelligent, and accurate monitoring methods for mangroves to understand better and protect mangrove ecosystems. This study promoted a novel model, MangroveNet, for integrating multi-scale spectral and spatial information and de-tecting mangrove area. In addition, we also presented an improved model—AttCloudNet+ to identify distribution of mangroves species based on high-resolution multispectral drone images. These models incorporate spectral and spatial attention mechanisms and have been shown to effectively address the limitations of traditional methods, which have been prone to inaccuracy and low efficiency in mangrove species identification. In this study, we compare the results from MangroveNet with the SegNet, UNet, and DeepUNet models. The findings demonstrate that the MangroveNet exhibits superior generalization learning capabilities and more accurate extraction outcomes than other deep learning models. The accuracy, F1_Score, mIoU, and precision of MangroveNet were 99.13%, 98.84%, 98.11%, and 99.14%, respectively. In terms of identifying mangrove species, the prediction results from AttCloudNet+ were compared with those obtained from traditional supervised and unsupervised classifications and various machine learning and deep learning methods. These included K-means clustering, ISODATA cluster analysis, random forest (RF), sup-port vector machines (SVM), and others. The comparison demonstrated that the mangrove species identification results obtained using AttCloudNet+ exhibited the most optimal performance in terms of the Kappa coefficient and the overall accuracy (OA) index, reach-ing 0.81 and 0.87, respectively. The two comparison results confirm the effectiveness of the two models developed in this study for identifying mangroves and their species. Overall, we provided an efficient solution based on deep learning with a dual attention mecha-nism in the acceptable real-time monitoring of mangroves and their species using high-resolution multispectral drone imagery.