High-Precision Flood Extraction from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images by Integrating FCN-RAM and Tolerance Rough Set
High-precision flood identification from high-resolution remote sensing images using deep learning network models is challenging. Severe cloud interference, limited receptive fields, insufficient boundary refinement and spatial detail preservation, and difficulty in accurately distinguishing water bodies from ground object shadows constrain the extraction method. Therefore, this study proposes an automatic flood information extraction method that integrates an improved Fully Convolutional Network classification and recognition model (FCN-RAM) with a rough tolerance set. First, a tolerance rough set algorithm was employed for sample data preprocessing. Subsequently, a Residual Attention Module (RAM) was introduced to optimize the U-Net architecture, dynamically adjusting the response intensity of deep features in both the channel and spatial dimensions to construct a deep learning-based FCN-RAM. Finally, comparative analyses were conducted on three high-resolution remote sensing datasets with different resolutions: Global surface water detection in Large-size very-High-resolution satellite imagery (GLH-Water), Gaofen Image Dataset (GID), and Earth Surface Water Dataset (ESWD). The results demonstrated that FCN-RAM consistently and substantially outperformed the baseline U-Net across all three datasets, achieving F1-score improvements of 10.64% (GLH-Water), 9.71% (GID), and 10.64% (ESWD), with corresponding overall accuracy gains of 9.97%, 11.15%, and 10.22%, respectively. Notably, the Intersection-over-Union (IoU) scores were elevated by 17.59% (GLH-Water), 15.66% (GID), and 13.63% (ESWD). The method also surpassed state-of-the-art models including ResNet and Water-SCNet, attaining peak overall accuracies of 98.61% (GLH-Water) and 97.37% (GID). Notably, while the proposed framework exhibits remarkable generalization across the evaluated multi-resolution benchmarks, its current validation is primarily confined to static water body delineation tasks. The model’s transferability to highly heterogeneous geographical regions with scarce training samples, as well as its extendability toward dynamic time-series flood evolution modeling, warrants further systematic investigation. The proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of waterbody information extraction, meets the requirements for high-precision information extraction from high-resolution imagery, and provides technical support for intelligent flood information extraction using high-resolution remote sensing.