Slender Object Scene Segmentation in Remote Sensing Image Based on Learnable Morphological Skeleton With Segment Anything Model

Morphological methods play a crucial role in remote sensing image processing, due to their ability to capture and preserve small structural details. However, most of the existing deep learning models for semantic segmentation are based on encoder-decoder architectures including U-Net and segment anything model (SAM), where the downsampling process tends to discard fine details. In this article, we propose a new approach that integrates learnable morphological skeleton prior (MorSP) into deep neural networks using the variational method. To address the difficulty in backpropagation in neural networks caused by the nondifferentiability presented in classical morphological operations, we provide a smooth representation of the morphological skeleton and design a variational segmentation model integrating MorSP by employing operator splitting and dual methods. Then, we integrate this model into the network architecture of SAM, which is achieved by adding a token to mask decoder and modifying the final sigmoid layer, ensuring the final segmentation results preserve the skeleton structure as much as possible. The experimental results on remote sensing datasets, including buildings, roads, and water bodies, demonstrate that our method outperforms the original SAM on slender object segmentation and exhibits better generalization capability.