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
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...
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
arXiv:2609.22834v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVS) of remote sensing imagery is a challenging pixel-level task requiring strong generalization and adaptation...
By Changhao Zhao, Linglin Zeng, Hai Liu
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
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:2603. 11804v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) adapted to remote sensing rely heavily on domain-specific image-text supervision, yet high-quality annotations for satellite and aerial imagery remain scarce and expensive to produce.
By Stefan Maria Ailuro (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Mario Markov (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Mohammad Mahdi (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Delyan Boychev (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Luc Van Gool (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Danda Pani Paudel (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski")
arXiv:2607. 15942v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remote sensing vision-language models are increasingly expected to support open-ended reasoning over Earth Observation data and a variety of tasks.
By Stefan Maria Ailuro (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Mario Markov (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Mohammad Mahdi (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Luc Van Gool (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Danda Pani Paudel (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski")
OptiSAR-Net++ introduces a new cross‑domain remote sensing visual grounding task (CD‑RSVG) and the first large‑scale benchmark dataset, OptSAR‑RSVG. The framework replaces Transformer decoding with a CLIP‑based contrastive approach, employing a patch‑level Low‑Rank Adaptation Mixture of Experts for efficient cross‑domain feature decoupling and a text‑guided dual‑gate fusion module for improved semantic‑visual alignment. Experiments show state‑of‑the‑art performance on OptSAR‑RSVG and DIOR‑RSVG, with notable gains in localization accuracy and computational efficiency.
By Xiaoyu Tang, Jun Dong, Jintao Cheng, Rui Fan
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