LWGANet: Addressing Spatial and Channel Redundancy in Remote Sensing Visual Tasks with Light-Weight Grouped Attention

Abstract

Light-weight neural networks for remote sensing (RS) visual analysis must overcome two inherent redundancies: spatial redundancy from vast, homogeneous backgrounds, and channel redundancy, where extreme scale variations render a single feature space inefficient. Existing models, often designed for natural images, fail to address this dual challenge in RS scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose LWGANet, a light-weight backbone engineered for RS-specific properties. LWGANet introduces two core innovations: a Top-K Global Feature Interaction (TGFI) module that mitigates spatial redundancy by focusing computation on salient regions, and a Light-Weight Grouped Attention (LWGA) module that resolves channel redundancy by partitioning channels into specialized, scale-specific pathways. By synergistically resolving these core inefficiencies, LWGANet achieves a superior trade-off between feature representation quality and computational cost. Extensive experiments on twelve diverse datasets across four major RS tasks--scene classification, oriented object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection--demonstrate that LWGANet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art light-weight backbones in both accuracy and efficiency. Our work establishes a new, robust baseline for efficient visual analysis in RS images.