# DUFormer: Solving Power Line Detection Task in Aerial Images using Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.05821 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05821/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [Conditional Positional Encodings for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10882/) (2021)
- [CMT: Convolutional Neural Networks Meet Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06263/) (2021)
- [Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08904/) (2018)
- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [Incorporating Convolution Designs into Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11816/) (2021)
- [LocalViT: Analyzing Locality in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05707/) (2021)
- [CAT: Cross Attention in Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05786/) (2021)
- [TopFormer: Token Pyramid Transformer for Mobile Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05525/) (2022)
- [Recalibrating Fully Convolutional Networks with Spatial and Channel 'Squeeze & Excitation' Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08127/) (2018)
- [TTPLA: An Aerial-Image Dataset for Detection and Segmentation of Transmission Towers and Power Lines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10032/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Vision-Based Power Line Cables and Pylons Detection for Low Flying Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14352/) (2024)
- [PGRID: Power Grid Reconstruction in Informal Developments Using High-Resolution Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07944/) (2024)
- [SEMIR: Topology-Preserving Graph Minors for Thin-Structure Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24935/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are frequently used for inspecting power lines and capturing high-resolution aerial images. However, detecting power lines in aerial images is difficult,as the foreground data(i.e, power lines) is small and the background information is abundant.To tackle this problem, we introduce DUFormer, a semantic segmentation algorithm explicitly designed to detect power lines in aerial images. We presuppose that it is advantageous to train an efficient Transformer model with sufficient feature extraction using a convolutional neural network(CNN) with a strong inductive bias.With this goal in mind, we introduce a heavy token encoder that performs overlapping feature remodeling and tokenization. The encoder comprises a pyramid CNN feature extraction module and a power line feature enhancement module.After successful local feature extraction for power lines, feature fusion is conducted.Then,the Transformer block is used for global modeling. The final segmentation result is achieved by amalgamating local and global features in the decode head.Moreover, we demonstrate the importance of the joint multi-weight loss function in power line segmentation. Our experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms all state-of-the-art methods in power line segmentation on the publicly accessible TTPLA dataset.