Using Improved YOLOv5 and SegFormer to Extract Tailings Ponds from Multi-Source Data

This paper proposes a framework that combines the improved "You Only Look Once" version 5 (YOLOv5) and SegFormer to extract tailings ponds from multi-source data. Points of interest (POIs) are crawled to capture potential tailings pond regions. Jeffries–Matusita distance is used to evaluate the optimal band combination. The improved YOLOv5 replaces the backbone with the PoolFormer to form a PoolFormer backbone. The neck introduces the CARAFE operator to form a CARAFE feature pyramid network neck (CRF-FPN). The head is substituted with an efficiency decoupled head. POIs and classification data optimize improved YOLOv5 results. After that, the SegFormer is used to delineate the boundaries of tailings ponds. Experimental results demonstrate that the mean average precision of the improved YOLOv5s has increased by 2.78% compared to the YOLOv5s, achieving 91.18%. The SegFormer achieves an intersection over union of 88.76% and an accuracy of 94.28%.