Open-vocabulary remote sensing segmentation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables pixel-level recognition of arbitrary categories specified by natural language, including classes unseen during training. However, geospatial domain shifts caused by heterogeneous regions, spatial resolutions, and acquisition platforms weaken visual-text matching and limit cross-dataset generalization.
The paper introduces OVRSISBench, a unified benchmark for open‑vocabulary remote sensing image segmentation, and evaluates existing OVS/OVRSIS models, uncovering their shortcomings in remote sensing contexts. Leveraging insights from this evaluation, the authors propose RSKT‑Seg, a new framework featuring a Multi‑Directional Cost Map Aggregation module, an Efficient Cost Map Fusion transformer, and a Remote Sensing Knowledge Transfer module. Experiments on the benchmark demonstrate that RSKT‑Seg outperforms strong baselines by +3.8 mIoU and +5.9 mACC while achieving twice the inference speed.
By Bingyu Li, Haocheng Dong, Da Zhang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Junyu Gao, Xuelong Li
arXiv:2608. 15647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic segmentation of very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery increasingly benefits from strong pretrained hierarchical encoders, yet exploiting their multi-stage representations remains difficult.
By Shuaishuai Cao, Meng Tang, Shuwei Peng, Xuan Liu, Min Huang, Jie Chen, Jiacheng Niu, Yong Chen, Edore Akpokodje, Hui Lin
The paper introduces Bidirectional Reciprocal Learning (BRL), a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework for referring image segmentation that operates on frozen vision foundation models. BRL employs two lightweight adapters—Reciprocal Attention Adapter (RAA) for token‑level cross‑modal attention and Reciprocal Gate Adapter (RGA) for channel‑level gating—to enable hierarchical, bidirectional information flow between vision and language. Experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show that BRL outperforms existing methods while updating fewer than 0.5% of backbone parameters.
By Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li, Yuting Yang, Long Sun, Wenping Ma, Xu Liu, Fang Liu
The paper introduces VPRef, the first cross‑domain benchmark for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation, containing 46,972 language‑image‑annotation triplets with a three‑tier linguistic hierarchy. It proposes a parameter‑efficient adaptation method based on the Segment Anything Model and Low‑Rank Adaptation, using pseudo‑label self‑training for visual drift and random multi‑granularity prompt mixing for textual drift. Experiments show the approach improves cross‑domain segmentation while altering only 1.08 % of the base model’s parameters, offering a strong baseline for future research.
By Quanwei Liu, Tao Huang, Jiaqi Yang, Wei Xiang
Rapid advancements in vision-language models have propelled Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) to the forefront of Earth observation. However, practical deployments suffer severe perf...
DeCo introduces an efficient decouple-to-couple learning framework for multi-task visual grounding, addressing conflicts between localization and segmentation tasks. It first applies Task-aware Semantic Decoupling (TSD) to separate shared visual cues into task-specific features guided by salient words, then uses Hybrid Prior Coupling (HPC) to merge sentence-level semantic priors with mask-derived spatial priors for improved grounding. Experiments across multiple natural and remote sensing datasets show that DeCo achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance while requiring only lightweight trainable parameters on a frozen multimodal encoder.
By Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Long Sun, Yuting Yang, Xu Liu, Lingling Li, Wenping Ma, Fang Liu
arXiv:2609.24510v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent advances in vision foundation models (VFMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse unimodal visual tasks. However, adapting VFMs...
By Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li, Yuting Yang, Long Sun, Wenping Ma, Xu Liu, Fang Liu
arXiv:2505.15147v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Remote sensing images (RSIs) capture both natural and human-induced changes on the Earth's surface. Semantic segmentation (SS) of RSIs enables the...
By Quanwei Liu, Tao Huang, Jiaqi Yang, Wei Xiang
arXiv:2608. 03023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remote sensing semantic segmentation is hindered by costly pixel-level annotations, motivating training-free open-vocabulary methods.
By Changhao Zhao, Haoxiang Li, Yuke Li, Hai Liu, LingLin Zeng
The paper introduces RSMEB, a unified benchmark for remote‑sensing multimodal retrieval that evaluates both cross‑modal and interleaved retrieval across 21 tasks under a single ranking protocol. It also presents VLM2GeoVec, an instruction‑conditioned single‑encoder model that embeds image, text, bounding‑box, and geo‑coordinate tokens into one sequence and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on region‑caption, referring‑expression, and semantic geo‑aware retrieval while remaining competitive on conventional tasks. The authors provide code, checkpoints, and data on GitHub to facilitate reproducibility.
By Emanuel S\'anchez Aimar, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Yonghao Xu, Michael Felsberg
arXiv:2607. 26107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense vision-language understanding, including object localization, region recognition, and open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, requires associating language concepts with spatially grounded visual regions.
By Xinran Liu, Shouqian Shi, Yutong Chen, Ge Wang, Xin-Wei Yao, Sheng Zhong