ICENET: A Semantic Segmentation Deep Network for River Ice by Fusing Positional and Channel-Wise Attentive Features

River ice monitoring is of great significance for river management, ship navigation and ice hazard forecasting in cold-regions. Accurate ice segmentation is one most important pieces of technology in ice monitoring research. It can provide the prerequisite information for the calculation of ice cover density, drift ice speed, ice cover distribution, change detection and so on. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aerial photography has the advantages of higher spatial and temporal resolution. As UAV technology has become more popular and cheaper, it has been widely used in ice monitoring. So, we focused on river ice segmentation based on UAV remote sensing images. In this study, the NWPU_YRCC dataset was built for river ice segmentation, in which all images were captured by different UAVs in the region of the Yellow River, the most difficult river to manage in the world. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public UAV image dataset for river ice segmentation. Meanwhile, a semantic segmentation deep convolution neural network by fusing positional and channel-wise attentive features is proposed for river ice semantic segmentation, named ICENET. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed ICENET outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving a superior result on the NWPU_YRCC dataset.