DualSwinFusionSeg: Multimodal Martian Landslide Segmentation via Dual Swin Transformer with Multi-Scale Fusion and UNet++

Automated landslide segmentation on Mars is one of the important tasks for understanding its surface processes, and all will aid in future space exploration. However, it remains a relatively underexplored open challenge because landslide morphology is highly variable, foreground regions are often sparse or irregular, and orbital observations combine heterogeneous spectral and topographic cues. In this context, this work investigates the capability of deep learning to address Martian landslide segmentation through an extensive assessment of modern neural segmentation models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide such a comprehensive exploration in this domain. We further propose TransCPLES, a U-shaped network that couples Contextual Progressive Layer Expansion feature extraction with Transformer-based contextual reasoning, enabling the model to capture local geomorphic patterns and broader spatial dependencies for more reliable landslide delineation. Experiments on MMLSv2, a seven-band multimodal Martian landslide dataset, show that TransCPLES achieves the best overall performance when evaluated on geographically distinct samples, with consistent delineation across different landslide extents, stable foreground discrimination, and a favorable balance between accuracy and computational cost compared with several state-of-the-art convolutional, attention-based, and Transformer-based segmentation models. With this work, we hope to provide a useful reference and encourage further research and development in deep learning for planetary remote sensing. Code will be available after publication.

Planetary surface exploration missions rely increasingly on autonomous robotic platforms capable of interpreting complex terrain to ensure safe navigation, enable targeted science, and improve operational efficiency, as demonstrated across past Mars missions from Viking through Perseverance. Among the key perception capabilities, landform classification provides contextual information for landing site selection and scientific analysis, while boulder segmentation supports hazard assessment and path planning. This paper presents MANTLE, a multi-task adaptive network for terrain and landform extraction. The model uses a shared DINOv2 backbone for high-level feature extraction with task-specific heads: a classification head for large-scale landform classification, and a segmentation head for pixel-wise boulder localization, each trained on curated datasets built respectively from HiRISE orbital imagery and MSL surface-level imagery. The classification head achieved a test accuracy of 92.56% across seven Martian terrain classes, while the segmentation head achieved a validation IoU of 0.753 and showed strong cross-sol generalization on a held-out test set from previously unseen rover traverses. A key advantage of MANTLE is its modular, extensible design, formalized here as the Modular Uplink Principle: only a shared, frozen backbone needs to remain onboard, while subsequent perception capabilities are trained on Earth as lightweight task-specific heads and uplinked without retraining the full model. This work demonstrates two such high-impact capabilities, terrain classification and boulder segmentation, as an initial realization of a framework built to support many more over a mission's lifetime. With this foundation, future explorers need not arrive on Mars fully formed, but can continue to learn, adapt, and grow more capable with every uplink.

Semantic segmentation is a crucial task for understanding Mars, the most Earth-like planet in our solar system. However, it is challenging because the Martian surface is highly unstructured and complex, making accurate pixel-level prediction and fine-grained annotation difficult. Recent advancements in deep learning have introduced numerous methods and datasets to address these challenges. Nevertheless, the field lacks a robust, publicly available, and reproducible baseline, as well as a unified benchmark to facilitate fair evaluations. In this work, we present nnMNet, a new baseline model designed for Martian terrain semantic segmentation. Building upon nnWNet, we integrate linear attention to better capture global context and employ lightweight convolutions to reduce computational overhead. To bridge the gap between local and global representations, we introduce the Spatially-Aware Fusion Block (SAFB), which augments and combines features with diverse characteristics. Furthermore, we establish a new benchmark by curating and standardizing three high-quality datasets for thorough evaluation. nnMNet achieves new state-of-the-art 86.61%, 83.25%, and 88.24% mIoU on SynMars-TW, SynMars-Air, and MarsScapes, respectively. Our code, models, and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/dereklee0310/nnMNet.