Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

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Remote sensing image segmentation assigns classes or object boundaries to pixels in satellite and aerial images, supporting tasks such as land-cover mapping, flood and wildfire monitoring, and building or road extraction. Common approaches include U-Net-style convolutional networks, transformers and state-space models, and fusion of optical, SAR, elevation, or time-series data; newer work also adapts geospatial foundation and vision-language models. Benchmarks such as ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam, LoveDA, OpenEarthMap, and Sen1Floods11 test accuracy across varied sensors, regions, and applications. A central challenge is reliable transfer under geographic, seasonal, and sensor shifts, while preserving fine boundaries and balancing annotation needs, computational cost, and performance on rare classes.

Latest papers

220 papers21 papers in the last four weeks, up 17% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

LALE: Lightweight-Transformer Architecture for Land-Cover Estimation
Jun 1, 2026Ümit Mert Çağlar, Alptekin TemizelRemote Sensing Image Segmentation Hybrid CNN-Transformer Architectures
Graduate School of Informatics, METU, Ankara, Turkey
A Modelling and Evaluation Framework for EuroCrops-Driven Sentinel-2 Crop Segmentation
May 30, 2026Alexandra Nicoleta Scarlat, Ioana Cristina Plajer, Alexandra BaicoianuRemote Sensing Image Segmentation Agricultural Remote Sensing
Transilvania University of Braşov, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Braşov, Romania
Building and Road Recognition in Dense Urban Informal Settlements: A Dataset and Benchmark
May 28, 2026Hongyu Long, Jiaxuan Liu, Rui CaoRemote Sensing Image Segmentation Building Footprint Extraction
UGOD Thrust, HKUST(GZ)
FLORO: A Multimodal Geospatial Foundation Model for Ecological Remote Sensing Across Sensors and Scales
May 27, 2026Jorge L. Rodriguez, Victor Angulo Morales, Areej Alwahas +6Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Geospatial Foundation Models
Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia · Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
RoadGIE: Towards A Global-Scale Aerial Benchmark for Generalizable Interactive Road Extraction
May 26, 2026Chenxu Peng, Chenxu Wang, Yimian Dai +3Image Segmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
NKIARI, Shenzhen Futian · VCIP, CS, Nankai University · AAIS, Nankai University +1
Joint Instance Segmentation and Geometric Attribute Regression for Roof Structures in Aerial Imagery
May 25, 2026Luuk Versteeg, Rob G. J. Wijnhoven, Martin R. OswaldImage Segmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
University of Amsterdam (UvA), The Netherlands · Spotr.ai, The Hague, The Netherlands
SFR-Net: Learning Scale-Frustum Representations for Ultra-Wide Area Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
May 25, 2026Chuyu Zhong, Keyan Chen, Qinzhe Yang +3Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
Department of Aerospace Intelligent Science and Technology, School of Astronautics, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China · Key Laboratory of Spacecraft Design Optimization and Dynamic Simulation Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China · College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore +1
Image-Conditioned Instance Prompt Network for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
May 23, 2026Biaoyu Ren, Qingsheng Wang, Cun Xu +2Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Referring Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China · School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China · College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China +1
Coarse-to-Fine Domain Incremental Learning with Attentive Distillation for Mining Footprint Segmentation in Multispectral Imagery
May 23, 2026Alif Tri Handoyo, Vincent C. S. Lee, Rizka Widyarini Purwanto +3Image Segmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Monash University, Indonesia · Monash University, Australia · Northeastern University, China +1
Plume Segmentation from MethaneSAT with Cross-Sensor Transfer Learning and Physics-Informed Postprocessing
May 22, 2026Manuel Pérez-Carrasco, Maya Nasr, Zhan Zhang +16Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Instance Segmentation
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA · Environmental Defense Fund, Washington, D.C., USA · Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA +7
Overcoming "Physics Shock" in Earth Observation A Heteroscedastic Uncertainty Framework for PINN-based Flood Inference
May 22, 2026Tewodros Syum Gebre, Jagrati Talreja, Matilda Anokye +1Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Uncertainty Quantification
Built Environment Department, College of Science and Technology, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC 27405 USA · United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, Richmond Hill, ON, Canada
Mapping Tomato Cropping Systems in California Using AlphaEarth Geospatial Embeddings and Deep Learning Analysis
May 20, 2026Mohammadreza Narimani, Alireza Pourreza, Parastoo FarajpoorRemote Sensing Image Segmentation Agricultural Remote Sensing
Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, 95616, USA
Latent Space Guided Scenario Sampling for Multimodal Segmentation Under Missing Modalities
May 19, 2026Irem Ulku, Ö. Özgür Tanrıöver, Erdem AkagündüzMissing-Modality Learning Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Department of Computer Engineering, Ankara University, Ankara, Türkiye · Department of Modeling and Simulation, Graduate School of Informatics, METU, Ankara, Türkiye
CryoNet: A Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Modal Debris-Covered Glacier Mapping. A Case Study of the Poiqu Basin, Central Himalaya
May 19, 2026Farzaneh Barzegar, Tobias Bolch, Norbert Kuehtreiber +1Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Remote Sensing
Institute of Geodesy, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria · Engineering Department, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy
deadtrees.earth-aerial: A Multi-Resolution Aerial Image Dataset for Tree Cover and Mortality Detection
May 19, 2026Ayushi Sharma, Clemens Mosig, Lukas Drees +9Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Remote Sensing
Chair of Sensor-based Geoinformatics, University of Freiburg, Germany · EcoVision Lab, DM3L, University of Zurich, Switzerland · Institute for Earth System Science and Remote Sensing, Leipzig University, Germany +1
Toward Near-Real-Time Marine Oil Spill Detection in SAR Imagery using Quantum-Assisted SVM
May 17, 2026Joseph Strauss, Jyotsna SharmaRemote Sensing Image Segmentation Quantum Annealing
Division of Computer Science & Engineering Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, United States · Department of Petroleum Engineeering Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, United States
Axial-Relation Guided Fusion State Space Model for Optical-Elevation Sensing Image Segmentation
May 16, 2026Feng Gao, Zhilin Jin, Yanhai Gan +2Image Segmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS 39762 USA
MAgSeg: Segmentation of Agricultural Landscapes in High-Resolution Satellite Imagery using Multimodal Large Language Models
May 15, 2026Piyush Tiwary, Utkarsh Ahuja, Depanshu Sani +5Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Agricultural Remote Sensing
Google DeepMind · Indian Institute of Science · Google
Highly Detailed and Generalizable Broadleaf Tree Crown Instance Segmentation from UAV Imagery
May 15, 2026Mitsutaka Nakada, Takahiko Ikebata, Kengo Ikebata +7Image Segmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
DeepForest Technologies Co., Ltd · DeepForest Technologies Co., Ltd., Kyoto 600-8006, Japan · YM Lab +9
ELDOR: A Dataset and Benchmark for Illegal Gold Mining in the Amazon Rainforest
May 14, 2026Kangning Cui, Surendra Bohara, Suraj Prasai +12Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Remote Sensing
Wake Forest University · City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan) · Duke University +7
MPerS: Dynamic MLLM MixExperts Perception-Guided Remote Sensing Scene Segmentation
May 11, 2026Ziyi Wang, Xianping Ma, Ziyao Wang +2Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing Image Captioning
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) · Southwest Jiaotong University
DA-SegFormer: Damage-Aware Semantic Segmentation for Fine-Grained Disaster Assessment
May 11, 2026Kevin Zhu, William Tang, Raphael Hay Tene +3Class-Imbalanced Learning Image Segmentation
Bina Labs, Lehigh University
Sequential Feature Selection for Efficient Landslide Segmentation from Multi-Spectral Data
May 10, 2026Arsalaan Ahmad, Oktay Karakus, Paul L. RosinRemote Sensing Image Segmentation Feature Selection
School of Computer Science and Informatics · Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom
Leveraging Image Generators to Address Training Data Scarcity: The Gen4Regen Dataset for Forest Regeneration Mapping
May 7, 2026Gabriel Jeanson, David-Alexandre Duclos, William Larrivée-Hardy +5Synthetic Data Augmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
1Northern Robotics Laboratory, Université Laval, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada · 2Département d’informatique et de génie logiciel, Université Laval, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada
DINO Soars: DINOv3 for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Imagery
May 4, 2026Ryan Faulkenberry, Saurabh PrasadImage Segmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
University of Houston
Multispectral Blind Image Super-Resolution for Standing Dead Tree Segmentation
May 4, 2026Mete Ahishali, Anis Ur Rahman, Einari Heinaro +2Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Department of Forest Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland · CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd., Espoo, Finland · KOKO Forest Ltd. +1
Cross-Polarization Fusion of VV AND VH SAR Observations for Improved Flood Mapping
May 4, 2026Jagrati Talreja, Tewodros Syum Gebre, Leila Hashemi BeniRemote Sensing Image Segmentation Flood Inundation Mapping
North Carolina A&T State University Greensboro, North Carolina, USA.
FLoRA: Fusion-Latent for Optical Reconstruction and Flood Area Segmentation via Cross-Modal Multi-Task Distillation Network
May 4, 2026Jagrati Talreja, Tewodros Syum Gebre, Leila Hashemi-BeniCross-Modal Knowledge Distillation Multi-Source Image Fusion
Geomatics Program, College of Science and Technology, North Carolina A&T Technical State University, Greensboro, North Carolina 27411, USA · Institute for Water, Environment and Health, United Nations University, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada
Remote SAMsing: From Segment Anything to Segment Everything
Apr 30, 2026Osmar Luiz Ferreira de Carvalho, Osmar Abílio de Carvalho Júnior, Anesmar Olino de Albuquerque +1Image Segmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil · Department of Geography, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil
Noise2Map: End-to-End Diffusion Model for Semantic Segmentation and Change Detection
Apr 30, 2026Ali Shibli, Andrea Nascetti, Yifang BanImage Segmentation Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Division of Geoinformatics, School of Architecture and Built Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 11428 Stockholm, Sweden

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LALE: Lightweight-Transformer Architecture for Land-Cover Estimation

Ümit Mert Çağlar, Alptekin Temizel

Graduate School of Informatics, METU, Ankara, Turkey

Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Hybrid CNN-Transformer Architectures Land Cover Classification Remote Sensing Efficient ViTs

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Semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery requires models that capture both global context and local detail under tight computational budgets. Prior work typically optimizes for one of these axes: attention for global context, convolution for local detail, or compactness for efficiency. While hybrid approaches aim to capture both, they require architectural changes and encoder backbones with computational overhead, limiting efficiency and performance. We present LALE (Lightweight-transformer Architecture for Land-cover Estimation), an end-to-end remote sensing image segmentation architecture, that bifurcates its encoder by resolution: lightweight ConvMixer stages handle high-resolution local features, while transformer stages handle low-resolution global context, confining the quadratic cost of self-attention to deep, downsampled feature maps. An all-MLP multi-scale decoder, together with RMSNorm and StarReLU throughout, further reduces compute and parameter count. On the large-scale ARAS400k remote-sensing segmentation benchmark, LALE establishes a strong efficiency-performance trade-off against CNN, transformer, and hybrid baselines. Our smallest variant, (just 1.6M parameters), reaches within 2.6 F1 points of the best baseline (UPerNet) while using 4.5x fewer parameters, 7x less storage, 17x fewer GMACs, and delivering 1.8x higher throughput. The codebase for LALE is publicly available at https://github.com/caglarmert/LALE.