BASeg: Boundary-Aware Remote Sensing Segmentation with Structural Penalties
Organizations: National University of Singapore · Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology · Massachusetts Institute of Technology · University of Florida
Abstract
Semantic segmentation is a core computer vision task in the remote sensing field, accelerating advancements in ur- ban development, agriculture, ecology, water resources, and environmental monitoring. However, recent methods usually struggle to capture fine-grained object features and bound- ary details. Besides, current widely used datasets often lack city morphology diversity and segmentation on generative im- ages remains largely unexplored. To address these issues, we propose a Mahalanobis-Angle Boundary Loss (MABL) that explicitly enhances boundary and shape consistency. MABL jointly models structural importance and boundary orientation through Mahalanobis distance-based weighting and angle- aware penalty. It can be readily integrated into diverse seg- mentation architectures and consistently improves their accu- racy. Built upon MABL, we introduce BASeg, a boundary- aware remote sensing segmentation framework with Struc- tural Penalties. BASeg integrates a Global Visual State Space module (GSM) with a Cross-Feature Fusion module (CFM) to capture both long-range contextual dependencies and fine- grained local details. Additionally, we establish a global 10- city benchmark dataset (GCD-25k) to facilitate accurate build- ing and road segmentation. Extensive experiments on four remote-sensing benchmarks demonstrate that BASeg consis- tently outperforms existing methods, achieving up to a 2.8% improvement in mIoU while producing more accurate object boundary segmentation across diverse scenes. Moreover, integrating MABL into multiple existing segmentation archi- tectures consistently improves performance across datasets, demonstrating its robustness and broad applicability.
Figures & tables
| Method | Backbone | GCD-25k | Vaihingen | HSRS | LoveDA | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bkg | Bld | Rd | mIoU | Imp | LV | Bld | Tree | Car | mIoU | mIoU | mAcc | mIoU | mAcc | ||
| ABCNet | ResNet | 73.08 | 52.57 | 41.48 | 55.71 | 73.27 | 59.85 | 80.59 | 70.92 | 51.45 | 67.22 | 62.48 | 76.46 | 44.35 | 62.54 |
| UNetFormer | ResNet | 72.90 | 52.70 | 50.56 | 58.72 | 73.79 | 60.23 | 81.16 | 71.93 | 54.65 | 68.35 | 63.76 | 76.62 | 41.90 | 64.32 |
| RS3Mamba | Mamba+ResNet | 77.69 | 62.68 | 57.89 | 66.09 | 77.90 | 62.28 | 81.00 | 77.37 | 51.32 | 70.77 | 68.19 | 80.31 | 45.70 | 64.39 |
| CMTFNet | ResNet | 73.21 | 54.76 | 45.97 | 57.98 | 78.24 | 59.80 | 85.25 | 72.54 | 50.35 | 69.24 | 65.53 | 74.11 | 40.53 | 58.22 |
| CMTFNet+MABL | ResNet | 76.55 | 61.02 | 56.97 | 64.85 | 77.08 | 64.76 | 85.99 | 73.65 | 54.86 | 71.27 | 66.04 | 78.03 | 44.97 | 63.46 |
| Dataset | Class | Only AngL | Only MaL | Combined | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | ||
| GCD-25k | Building | 63.66 | 77.41 | 63.87 | 77.26 | 63.87 | 78.00 |
| Road | 60.40 | 74.70 | 60.20 | 76.34 | 61.48 | 77.84 | |
| Background | 81.21 | 89.87 | 81.36 | 89.88 | 81.24 | 89.36 | |
| mIoU / mAcc | 68.42 | 80.66 | 68.48 | 81.16 | 68.86 | 81.73 | |
| Vaihingen | Impervious | 75.40 | 85.49 | 73.66 | 83.81 | 79.72 | 87.00 |
| GSM | No RCM | No Coord. Attn. | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CFM | CCM | |||||||
| Class | IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc |
| Impervious | 72.65 | 80.86 | 74.65 | 84.19 | 74.93 | 83.81 | 79.12 | 87.00 |
| Low Vegetation | 57.66 | 73.94 | 62.14 | 77.06 | 62.37 | 76.25 | 66.46 | 77.28 |
| Building | 82.66 | 93.30 | 85.47 | 93.29 | 85.66 | 94.41 | 88.25 | 94.42 |
| Tree | 71.49 | 81.45 | 72.18 | 82.66 | 72.36 | 83.49 | 73.92 | 84.82 |
| Loss | Time (ms/image) | mIoU | mAcc |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cross-entropy | 9.36 | 69.24 | 80.47 |
| SAM loss | 11.29 | 70.15 | 83.72 |
| ABL | 18.91 | 70.72 | 83.25 |
| MABL | 18.27 | 71.27 | 86.34 |
| Model | GFLOPs | Parameters (M) | mIoU |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMTFNet | 8.57 | 30.07 | 69.24 |
| RS3Mamba | 15.83 | 43.32 | 70.77 |
| PyramidMamba | 64.70 | 125.09 | 69.63 |
| Samba | 118.11 | 51.86 | 65.99 |
| Ours | 17.13 | 41.79 | 73.08 |
| City | Building (%) | Road (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Abuja | 16.27 | 7.33 |
| Barcelona | 23.04 | 9.89 |
| Boston | 11.76 | 8.26 |
| Kinshasa | 22.83 | 8.72 |
| Paris | 22.69 | 9.19 |
| Perth | 20.79 | 8.87 |
| Method | Bkg | Road | Bld | Veg | Water | Car | Field | Court | Square | mIoU |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ABCNet | 76.23 | 56.13 | 58.16 | 69.38 | 74.50 | 69.38 | 50.08 | 77.70 | 30.73 | 62.48 |
| UNetformer | 76.16 | 60.26 | 59.16 | 65.70 | 73.95 | 73.22 | 54.20 | 80.09 | 31.10 | 63.76 |
| CMTFNet | 71.38 | 61.32 | 58.93 | 63.84 | 71.34 | 82.83 | 54.07 | 88.70 | 37.38 | 65.53 |
| RS3Mamba | 78.24 | 67.25 | 64.01 | 69.53 | 77.53 | 78.73 | 56.14 | 84.54 | 37.73 | 68.19 |
| Samba | 75.21 | 60.21 | 61.61 | 71.03 | 72.47 | 64.96 | 46.72 | 85.38 | 32.55 | 63.35 |
| PyramidMamba | 77.40 | 67.24 | 62.73 | 69.87 | 76.38 | 47.26 | 57.36 | 87.30 | 43.11 | 65.41 |
| Method | Bkg | Bld | Road | Water | Forest | Agriculture | mIoU |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ABCNet | 37.43 | 56.04 | 53.32 | 54.67 | 35.65 | 28.98 | 44.35 |
| UNetformer | 37.61 | 52.78 | 51.89 | 63.47 | 34.23 | 11.44 | 41.90 |
| CMTFNet | 30.71 | 46.29 | 53.24 | 46.61 | 38.65 | 28.17 | 40.61 |
| Samba | 34.20 | 38.74 | 43.11 | 62.70 | 35.87 | 17.11 | 38.62 |
| PyramidMamba | 35.02 | 58.06 | 59.82 | 63.74 | 31.31 | 18.48 | 44.44 |
| Ours | 36.93 | 59.19 | 56.87 | 62.72 | 39.82 | 29.62 | 47.53 |
| Dataset | Class | No Mahalanobis Loss | No Angle Loss | Ours | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | ||
| LoveDA | Background | 36.03 | 58.95 | 35.51 | 61.15 | 36.93 | 61.45 |
| Building | 57.63 | 89.68 | 57.55 | 89.48 | 59.19 | 85.97 | |
| Road | 54.69 | 71.28 | 54.37 | 71.69 | 56.87 | 69.51 | |
| Water | 58.08 | 67.89 | 56.60 | 62.86 | 62.72 | 73.84 | |
| Forest | 42.52 | 85.41 | 34.99 | 84.01 | 39.82 | 87.05 | |
| Class | No RCM | No Coord. Attn. | RCM-2 | RCM-3 | GSM | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | |
| Building | 63.38 | 76.43 | 61.32 | 75.84 | 63.97 | 77.89 | 64.22 | 77.01 | 63.87 | 78.00 |
| Road | 60.56 | 77.08 | 57.17 | 73.39 | 60.66 | 76.06 | 60.49 | 73.88 | 61.48 | 77.84 |
| Background | 81.10 | 89.74 | 76.62 | 86.73 | 78.46 | 87.90 | 79.07 | 89.09 | 81.24 | 89.36 |
| mIoU / mAcc | 68.34 | 81.08 | 65.04 | 78.65 | 67.70 | 80.62 | 67.93 | 79.99 | 68.86 | 81.73 |
| Class | No SA | No CSA | CFM | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | IoU | Acc | |
| Building | 54.81 | 68.66 | 59.12 | 72.75 | 63.87 | 78.00 |
| Road | 45.50 | 50.17 | 53.84 | 67.96 | 61.48 | 77.84 |
| Background | 76.13 | 87.76 | 79.05 | 89.26 | 81.24 | 89.36 |
| mIoU / mAcc | 58.82 | 72.20 | 64.00 | 76.66 | 68.86 | 81.73 |
Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Remote sensing image segmentation labels land cover and objects in satellite, aerial, radar, and multispectral imagery.
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