Semantic_Segmentation
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FGD2HF: Frequency-guided Dual-domain Hypergraph Fusion for Semantic Segmentation
2026-10-26 02:33:54Xiaofan Yang, Wei Pan, Yubin Liu, Junyu Wu, Junming Zhang, Jie ZhaoAbstract
Frequency-domain information is beneficial for semantic segmentation. However, existing frequency-based methods often suffer from insufficient frequency utilization, inefficient fusion, and high computational complexity. To address these issues, we propose FGD2HF, a dual-domain fusion network that leverages frequency features to guide spatial-domain fusion and enhancement. Specifically, we introduce a novel Hybrid-Attention Encoder (NAHA) that jointly models local and global relationships through neighborhood and hypergraph attention, enhancing the network's ability to extract effective features. We further introduce a Wavelet Transform and Enhancement (WTE) module to extract and refine low- and high-frequency cues from preceding-stage features, followed by Frequency-guided Dual-domain Fusion (FGDF) modules that use frequency cues to condition current-stage spatial grouping and feature propagation. This design incorporates both global and local frequency guidance into spatial feature modulation, enhancement and fusion with low computational cost. Extensive comparisons with numerous state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods demonstrate that our method is highly competitive. Our full FGD2HF-B model achieves 48.7% mIoU on ADE20K (+0.3% over SegMAN-B with 18% fewer GFLOPs), 83.2% mIoU on Cityscapes (comparable to SegMAN-B with 21% fewer GFLOPs), and 1.1% higher mIoU than VWFormer-T on SBD with 21% fewer GFLOPs, while also achieving significant improvements in boundary segmentation accuracy.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34734
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FreqPKC: Frequency-Aware PeakConv for Radar Semantic Segmentation
2026-10-24 07:22:22Yangyong Deng, Pengyu Zhang, Shaoqiu Song, Xiaotao Huang, Jian WangAbstract
Automotive millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar has attracted increasing attention for semantic segmentation in autonomous driving, owing to its robustness under adverse weather and lighting conditions. Recent works have introduced radar-specific neural operators such as PeakConv (PKC), inspired by constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection, to better model the peak-dominated characteristics of radar images. However, existing methods typically treat the guard bandwidth as learnable parameters, without explicitly characterizing the frequency response of the PKC operator. In this work, we revisit PKC from a frequency-domain perspective and propose Frequency-Aware PeakConv (FreqPKC), which explicitly models and exploits its underlying spectral characteristics. By analyzing the frequency response of PKC, FreqPKC enables the network to capture a broader range of frequency components and adaptively adjust its effective bandwidth. With the proposed Frequency-Aware (FA) module, the network can infer appropriate guard bandwidths to balance high- and low-frequency information: it enhances high-frequency components in target regions for more precise segmentation while suppressing noise through low-frequency filtering in background areas. Building on FreqPKC, we further develop FreqPKC-Net, a radar semantic segmentation (RSS) framework that integrates frequency-guided adaptive modulation with cross-view fusion for multi-view inputs, and can also be adapted to single-view data. Experiments on the public datasets CARRADA, CARRADA-RAC, and a self-built dataset named RS-SAR demonstrate that FreqPKC-Net consistently outperforms existing SoTA methods on both range-Doppler and range-angle views.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33504
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Automated identification of ivory carvings using machine learning: A proof-of-concept approach to detecting the illegal wildlife trade
2026-10-23 19:45:43Andrius Tamosiunas, Simone Mozzon, David Bacon, Caroline Cox, Alan CollinsAbstract
Despite a ban on the international trading of recently poached ivory, elephants are still killed for their tusks. Ivory and its products are mainly sold in online marketplaces. However, due to the huge volume and variety of adverts and the similarity of ivory with other materials that can be legally sold, it is hard for enforcement officials to identify illicit trading and prosecute sellers. Existing techniques for identifying elephant ivory, such as Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and microscopy, can reliably distinguish ivory from other materials, but require physical access to the item and cannot be applied to photographs alone. As a result, these methods are unsuitable for screening the large volume of images posted in online marketplaces, leaving a gap for automated, image-based identification tools. In this proof of concept work, we investigate the potential of machine learning techniques for image analysis to automatically distinguish ivory objects from bone. We employ a semantic segmentation framework using a U-Net architecture with a ResNet34 backbone, leveraging transfer learning on an augmented dataset of 541 original images. Using a dataset of images of ivory and items resembling carved ivory, several models were trialled. On a distinct test set, the classifier achieved an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.81 and an overall classification accuracy of 81% on confident samples. The paper presents the best-performing model as a proof of concept for developing a system that can effectively identify ivory and its products when indicative features of elephant ivory are present in an image. This work provides initial steps towards a machine learning-based framework designed to advise law-enforcement in detecting illegal elephant ivory trade.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33243
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DriveOSS: Dataset and Benchmark for 3D Anomaly Segmentation and Open-set Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving
2026-10-23 13:33:39Zhiran Yan, Savankumar Bhanderi, Sourabh Lolge, Rui Song, Girdharbhai Paneliya, Shiva Agrawal, Gordon ElgerAbstract
Recent advances in 3D semantic segmentation have significantly improved scene understanding in autonomous driving. However, existing methods are typically developed under a closed-set assumption and evaluated under standard driving conditions, where all categories are known in advance. In real-world driving, autonomous vehicles inevitably encounter previously unseen objects, making closed-set perception insufficient for safe deployment. To address this challenge, we introduce DriveOSS, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first real-world multimodal dataset and benchmark specifically designed for 3D anomaly segmentation and open-set semantic segmentation. It contains 12,661 synchronized and annotated frames captured using six surround-view RGB cameras, a 128-beam LiDAR, and a GPS/IMU unit. The dataset comprises 52 real-world driving scenes collected under clear, nighttime, cloudy, rainy, and snowy conditions and is organized into ID (in-distribution) and OOD (out-of-distribution) subsets. The ID scenes contain only known classes and are used for training, whereas the OOD scenes additionally contain unknown objects annotated as the outlier class and are used for validation and testing. Extensive experiments show that unseen objects remain a major challenge for current 3D perception systems. The dataset, benchmark protocols, and code are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32612
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RecallGS: Geometry-Grounded Recall for Online Semantic Gaussian Splatting
2026-10-22 13:55:31Thanh-Khoi Nguyen, Thien-Phuc Tran, Minh-Triet TranAbstract
Online semantic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables open-vocabulary scene understanding from streaming observations. However, existing methods recover geometric context missing from image-derived semantic features using an additionally learned 3D network, incurring extra training and runtime overhead. We observe that such geometric-semantic evidence may already exist in the agent's observation history and can be retrieved rather than learned. Based on this insight, we introduce RecallGS (Geometry-Grounded Recall for Online Semantic Gaussian Splatting), a lightweight, training-free mechanism that treats past observations as a non-parametric geometric-semantic prior. RecallGS follows a recall-ground-fuse pipeline: CLIP retrieves relevant observations, alpha-compositing weights identify geometrically supported views, and aggregate their semantic features over each Gaussian's rendered footprint. On ScanNet and ScanNet++, RecallGS achieves strong semantic segmentation performance at 2.48 FPS, demonstrating that geometric-semantic context can be effectively recovered from observation history without an additional learned 3D branch.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31293
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RaSFNet: Ray-aligned and Scan-aware Fusion Network for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
2026-10-22 12:35:29Chuang ChenAbstract
LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of 3D perception for autonomous driving and robotics. Projection-based methods map 3D point clouds into 2D representations for feature extraction using 2D networks. However, aggregating multiple points during projection can obscure geometric differences within each frustum, while local feature extraction limits the modeling of spatial relationships across scanning regions. Moreover, proximity in the projected representation does not necessarily imply proximity in 3D space, and interactions between point and projected features may mix features from different ranges, reducing semantic discriminability. To address these challenges, we propose the Ray-aligned and Scan-aware Fusion Network (RaSFNet), which incorporates point cloud geometry and LiDAR scanning characteristics into projection-based semantic segmentation. Specifically, the Ray-Aligned Geometric Distribution Encoding (RAGDE) module characterizes point distributions within each frustum using a ray-aligned coordinate system. To model spatial context, a Scan-Topology-Aware Mamba (STAM) block organizes frustum features according to the LiDAR azimuth sampling pattern and captures long-range dependencies across scanning regions. In addition, a Range-Constrained Point-Frustum Fusion (RCPFF) mechanism uses shared range information to guide feature exchange between point and frustum representations while maintaining spatial correspondence. RaSFNet achieves mIoU scores of 70.2% and 77.7% on the SemanticKITTI and nuScenes validation sets, respectively, indicating competitive segmentation performance compared with the evaluated methods.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31186
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Refining Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Regional Semantics and Visual Prototypes
2026-10-22 02:36:18Aijing Yu, Zhengbo Wang, Lijun Sheng, Jian Liang, Xiao-Yu ZhangAbstract
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has shown superior performance in the image-level open-vocabulary classification task, benefiting from its powerful alignment of visual features and text embeddings. However, dense prediction tasks require models to perform pixel-level predictions, necessitating modifications to CLIP for region-text alignment. In this paper, we adjust the attention layers within the vanilla visual encoder of CLIP. With a novel attention calculation method for selective attention features, the model retains more regional semantic information. To further mitigate the negative impact of the modality gap, we introduce additional visual prototypes to refine the original predictor solely based on text embeddings. Specifically, patch features with confident predictions are selected to form an additional auxiliary memory-based classifier for more accurate prediction. We further integrate an optimizable feature extractor with an exponential moving average updating strategy to enhance prediction quality. Extensive experiments on $5$ semantic segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30623
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Multiclass Boundary Refinement with Neural Cellular Automata for Remote Sensing Land Cover Segmentation
2026-10-21 16:41:16Pascoassis Souza Santos Meira, Gilson Antonio Giraldi, Rafael Duarte Coelho dos SantosAbstract
Semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery often places class boundaries a few pixels away from where they truly lie, and this position error is concentrated in the thin band measured by Boundary IoU (BIoU). We treat boundary refinement as the iterated application of a small learned local rule: the Boundary Refinement Neural Cellular Automaton (BRNCA), that starts from the class probabilities of a frozen, pre-trained segmenter and corrects them cell by cell. We generalise the binary rNCA to the multiclass case by keeping the visible channels on the probability simplex through an Aitchison (log-space) update and by adding free hidden channels. The best configuration improves the mean BIoU over the base segmenter by 2.36 points (from 46.63 to 48.99). The gain is concentrated on the irregular woodland class (+8.5 points BIoU); this suggests that position error is correlated with the fractal dimension of the class boundaries.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30007
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Stochastic Nonlinearities Improve Uncertainty Estimation
2026-10-21 15:26:12Mohammad Sarhangzadeh, Amirreza M. Shebly, Doruk OnerAbstract
Reliable uncertainty estimation is important across visual recognition tasks, providing information about the confidence and reliability of model predictions. Many uncertainty estimation methods obtain predictive diversity through mechanisms that can suppress intermediate features, perturb the input, or require substantial additional computation. Stochastic activation functions, where network units randomly select between multiple nonlinearities during a forward pass, have previously been used to improve optimization behavior, mitigate limitations of fixed ReLU activations, and increase output diversity. In this work, we reframe stochastic activation switching as a lightweight mechanism for uncertainty estimation. The proposed method samples between nonlinear activation functions, inducing predictive diversity while keeping intermediate feature pathways active. This enables uncertainty estimation from a single trained model without the training cost of ensembles, task-specific uncertainty heads, or architectural redesign. We evaluate the proposed approach across classification, semantic segmentation, and out-of-distribution detection using convolutional and transformer-based architectures on diverse datasets. Across these settings, stochastic activation switching improves uncertainty quality while preserving competitive primary-task performance, showing that stochastic nonlinearities provide an effective and information-preserving source of predictive variation for visual recognition.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29875
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RangeNav: Task-Aligned LiDAR Range-Image Pretraining for Robot Navigation
2026-10-21 15:06:08Samuel Foo Enze, Manthan Patel, Fan Yang, Linus Kramer, Pascal Roth, Marco Hutter, Cesar CadenaAbstract
Autonomous mobile robots operating in dense crowds and cluttered sites require $360^\circ$ perception to react to surrounding hazards. While panoramic LiDAR offers full-surround coverage, learning representations within reinforcement learning (RL) is sample-inefficient under sparse rewards, and existing 3D pretrained point-cloud encoders are too memory-heavy for massively parallel RL simulation. We present RangeNav, a compact (183k parameters) LiDAR range-image encoder pretrained entirely on synthetic data. RangeNav uses anisotropic convolutions and circular padding to handle the extreme aspect ratio and azimuthal seam of range images. We pretrain the network using a navigation-aligned objective combining range reconstruction, semantic segmentation, and bird's-eye-view (BEV) prediction, then freeze it for policy learning. In simulation, adding semantic and BEV supervision increases success rates over a reconstruction-only baseline by an average of 32.03 and 23.73 percentage points (pp) in procedurally generated training and out-of-distribution realistic test environments, respectively. Zero-shot real-world deployments on a Unitree B2-W quadruped demonstrate robust navigation through dense crowds, low-light settings, and construction zones where limited-field-of-view depth policies struggle. Code and models will be open-sourced.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29845
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LLMSeg: Training-Free Text-Prompted Image Segmentation with B-Splines
2026-10-21 08:35:16Abdullah HamdiAbstract
Promptable segmentation models such as SAM 3 achieve remarkable open-vocabulary performance but require dedicated architectures, large-scale annotation engines, and task-specific training. We ask a different question: can a general-purpose multimodal large language model (MLLM) segment images directly, without an added segmentation head, mask decoder, or training? We present LLMSeg, a training-free pipeline that turns a vision-capable LLM into a text-prompted image segmenter. LLMSeg decomposes segmentation into three LLM-driven stages. First, detect localizes all instances matching a free-form text query and describes their coarse morphology. Next, segment traces each instance using closed periodic B-splines confined to its detected box. These splines define an outer boundary and optional hole loops. Finally, refine iteratively proposes focus boxes around residual errors and retraces confined splines. The process ends when the mask stabilizes or the pass budget is exhausted. The output is a binary mask with inspectable intermediate geometry. We evaluate LLMSeg across ten referring and reasoning segmentation splits (ReasonSeg and RefCOCO/+/g). We also evaluate open-vocabulary instance segmentation (LVIS, COCO, and SA-Co), semantic segmentation, and zero-shot detection (ODinW13 and RF-100VL). With an off-the-shelf Gemini-3.7-Flash backend, LLMSeg is competitive with and often surpasses the specialist SAM 3 model on identical items. It reaches 71.5 cIoU on ReasonSeg val without additional segmentation-specific training. Backend model updates can improve accuracy without retraining the pipeline. The code is available at this https URL .
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29409
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AOV-GS: Active Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping with 3D Gaussian Splatting
2026-10-21 08:02:14Rodion Shkokov, Tatiana Zemskova, Dmitry YudinAbstract
Robots deployed in human-centered environments need maps that support both geometric navigation and open-vocabulary semantic queries beyond a fixed label set. A key challenge is enriching such maps with semantic information without relying on manually annotated segmentation masks or closed-set semantic categories. Existing geometry-driven active mapping maximizes coverage but treats semantics as a passive by-product of the collected trajectory, whereas active semantic mapping typically depends on supervised semantic segmentation. We present AOV-GS, an active 3D Gaussian mapping system that guides exploration using frozen foundation models. During coarse exploration, AOV-GS re-ranks geometrically promising candidate views according to CLIP mask-embedding novelty computed from SAM instance segmentation, biasing exploration toward semantically informative regions. Frozen SAM and CLIP provide instance masks and language-aligned embeddings throughout mapping, while a lightweight scene-specific language field is fitted offline directly to the collected CLIP embeddings rather than manually annotated masks, enabling open-vocabulary text-query segmentation on novel views. In a controlled comparison using the same SAM-CLIP perception stack, AOV-GS improves average language-field mIoU over geometry-only active planning by 1.3 percentage points on Replica (34.6% on eight scenes) and by 1.8 points on Matterport3D (23.1% on five scenes). With CorrCLIP, AOV-GS reaches 35.6% on Replica, 2.0 points above the matched Geometry-based + CorrCLIP baseline. Novel-view PSNR remains comparable to the geometry-only baseline on both datasets while depth L1 improves on Replica. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29374
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RAHF-Net: Range-Aware Heterogeneous Fusion for LiDAR-Assisted RGB Semantic Segmentation
2026-10-20 21:00:32R. D. Lin, Pengcheng Weng, Ge Wang, Han Ding, Fei WangAbstract
This paper studies LiDAR-assisted RGB semantic segmentation, where LiDAR point-cloud features improve dense pixel-wise predictions in the RGB image plane rather than 3D point labels or detections. Existing 2D fusion methods often project point clouds into shallow depth/range maps and apply spatially uniform fusion, discarding rich 3D structure and ignoring the range-dependent reliability of outdoor LiDAR. We propose RAHF-Net, a Range-Aware Heterogeneous Fusion Network. Its Cylindrical-to-Perspective (C2P) module projects pretrained cylindrical voxel features into the image plane, preserving structured 3D semantic priors. A Range-Aware Heterogeneous Fusion (RAHF) module then uses a soft depth-derived range mask to perform LiDAR-guided geometric enhancement in reliable near-field regions and visual-context enhancement in sparse far-field regions. On KITTI-360, RAHF-Net achieves 65.76 mIoU, outperforming representative RGB-only and RGB-LiDAR baselines, including CMX by 1.45 points. Experiments on DELIVER further demonstrate improved robustness under adverse weather, illumination degradation, and sensor corruption.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25400
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Efficient SAM3 Adaptation for Multi-Class Semantic Segmentation via Dense Competitive Representations
2026-10-20 10:06:19Wenbin Liao, Hao Zhu, Yike Ma, Hao Jiang, Feng DaiAbstract
The Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) has achieved significant progress in Promptable Concept Segmentation (PCS) by processing short noun phrases to generate segmentation masks with unique instance identifiers. While SAM3 excels at single-concept segmentation, it falls short in complex, real-world environments where multiple concepts must be segmented simultaneously. In particular, SAM3 typically fails to simultaneously process concepts with semantic overlap, leading to semantic misclassifications and redundant mask predictions. Moreover, as the number of concepts increases, the independent inference paradigm introduces prohibitive inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose the Dense Competitive Representations SAM (DCR-SAM) framework. By decoupling cross-modal interactions, the proposed method alleviates the inference latency. To resolve semantic misclassifications, DCR-SAM dynamically aligns textual concepts with visual representations and incorporates a dense competition head to enforce explicit inter-class competition. Furthermore, a learnable background token is applied to absorb non-target objects dynamically. These mechanisms effectively suppress overlapping predictions and generate high-fidelity masks. Extensive experimental evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework: (1) achieves a 2.3% $\sim$ 10.7% performance improvement over state-of-the-art methods, (2) delivers a 33$\times$ inference speedup compared to the native SAM3, and (3) exhibits strong robustness across diverse scenarios.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27960
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Diversity Without Labels: Task-Agnostic Coreset Selection Across Perception and Action
2026-10-16 15:43:21Julia Hindel, Benjamin Ramtoula, Kyuhwan Yeon, Nick Heppert, Paul Newman, Daniele De Martini, Abhinav ValadaAbstract
While data collection for model training is relatively easy, curating high-quality datasets from large collections is inherently challenging. Coreset estimation methods address this problem by identifying the best data subsets to train models on. However, existing approaches often require proxy model training, extensive annotations, or task-specific tailoring. Unsupervised alternatives typically exploit geometric properties in foundation model feature spaces, but are limited to pairwise image-to-image comparisons or comparisons against a fixed subset. We introduce CoreDNA, an unsupervised, task-agnostic coreset estimation approach that pools neuron activations from vision foundation models into per-image and per-dataset distributions. By comparing each image's distribution to the dataset-level distribution, CoreDNA can capture both low-level visual structure and high-level semantic information across layers. We find that high-quality samples concentrate in the tails of the last layer's activation statistics, which we validate by relating them to training-based coreset methods. Building on these findings, we develop a computationally efficient selection mechanism to construct task-agnostic, high-quality coresets for selective annotation and model training. Across image classification, semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and imitation learning for end-to-end driving and mobile manipulation, CoreDNA matches or outperforms the state of the art, demonstrating unprecedented generalization across perception and action tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness of compact activation-based representations for data selection.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23642
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ShadowCast: On-the-Fly Context-Aware Shadow Augmentation for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
2026-10-16 13:23:56Yechan Kim, Dongho Yoon, Jongmin Joo, JongHyun Park, Moongu JeonAbstract
Shadows cast by elevated objects alter the spectral appearance and obscure the boundaries of objects in remote sensing images, thereby degrading semantic segmentation performance. Most existing approaches handle shadows as degradations to be detected and removed, requiring additional costs from dedicated networks and shadow-specific annotations. We propose ShadowCast, which takes the opposite approach: it synthesizes shadows and injects them during training for remote sensing segmentation. It extracts masks of elevated objects, such as buildings and trees, directly from the segmentation labels and estimates an image-specific cast-shadow direction cue by probing the brightness around them. It then projects synthetic shadows along the inferred cast-shadow direction, requiring no learned network and no acquisition metadata. Experiments on three widely used remote sensing benchmarks, Vaihingen, Potsdam, and LoveDA, show that ShadowCast consistently outperforms the baseline across diverse state-of-the-art segmentation architectures. Moreover, it brings additional performance gains when combined with standard augmentation and regularization techniques, indicating that stochastic shadow injection serves as a simple and complementary augmentation strategy for remote sensing segmentation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23440
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SpikeQ: Spike-Guided Post-Training Quantization for Spiking Neural Networks
2026-10-16 07:24:52Kai Sun, Peibo Duan, Zhanglu Yan, Guowei Zhang, Yongsheng Huang, Levin KuhlmannAbstract
On neuromorphic chips, spiking neural networks (SNNs) consume far less energy than artificial neural networks (ANNs), but the limited memory of these chips requires low-bit synaptic weights and membrane potentials. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods provide them without retraining and, like those for ANNs, minimize numerical errors such as the mean squared error (MSE). In an SNN, however, a quantization error reaches later layers only through the spikes it flips. We find that errors of equal MSE can cause very different accuracy losses, whereas errors that flip the same fraction of spikes cause the same loss. We therefore propose SpikeQ, a spike-guided PTQ framework. For weights, we select the level of each weight by simulating the downstream neurons and minimizing their spike errors. For membrane potentials, most existing methods quantize the state after the reset, whereas neuromorphic chips compare the threshold with the membrane potential stored at a fixed bit width. We target this pre-fire quantization and build a reset-aware grid that places the threshold on a rounding boundary, so rounding never flips the spike at the current time step. We evaluate SpikeQ on seven benchmarks of image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. With 2-bit pre-fire membrane potentials, every existing grid collapses, whereas SpikeQ retains most of the full-precision accuracy. With both at 4 bits, the models stay within 2.59 points of full precision, shrink their memory footprint 7.8--7.9 times, and use 6.4--6.9 times less energy.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23046
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MaskMerge: Structure-aware Token Merging for Efficient Instance Segmentation
2026-10-16 04:37:01Bavesh Balaji, Letian Jiang, Alexander Wong, David Clausi, Sirisha RambhatlaAbstract
Token merging improves the efficiency of Vision Transformers by combining redundant tokens, but existing methods largely rely on feature similarity to determine which tokens to merge. This criterion is effective for semantic segmentation, yet can fail in instance segmentation, where adjacent objects of the same class often have highly similar features. We identify this failure mode as cross-instance token fusion. We introduce MaskMerge, an instance-aware token merging method that uses coarse intermediate mask predictions to constrain feature-based merging and preserve instance boundaries. We evaluate MaskMerge on two diverse instance segmentation domains characterized by high inter-instance visual similarity: PanNuke and iSAID. Against the SOTA token merging method ALGM, MaskMerge improves mAP from 30.1 to 32.1 on PanNuke while reducing computation from 229 to 153 GFLOPs and running 1.18x faster, and from 33.1 to 36.2 on iSAID while reducing computation from 198 to 182 GFLOPs and running 1.23x faster. Additionally, we also test it on Cityscapes and match ALGM's performance while using fewer FLOPs. The gains also transfer to an MAE pretrained backbone, demonstrating that instance-aware merging enables more aggressive compression when appearance similarity alone cannot reliably preserve object identity.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22921
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Safe and Fuel-Efficient Motion Planning for Lunar Propulsive Drones
2026-10-15 17:05:04Elena Wittemyer, Graco GaoAbstract
Propulsive drones are a promising new technology for generating high-resolution terrain models of the Moon. In future lunar missions, propulsive drones will complete a series of hops across the lunar surface while capturing images with downward-facing cameras. We present an autonomous motion planning framework that uses a vision-guided optimal control strategy for performing safe, efficient hops between specified waypoints. The drone plans parabolic hops between waypoints generated by a global-level planner; if a nominal waypoint is unsafe or unreachable, the drone then completes a diversion maneuver to safely land. To evaluate the validity of potential landing sites, we develop a custom semantic segmentation model for identifying obstacles from aerial images, and we introduce an approach for rapidly calculating reachable terrain. We then use model predictive control (MPC) to robustly track hop trajectories that guide the drone towards safe landing sites. We test the optimal hop planner in a high-fidelity lunar simulation environment. Our results demonstrate that our unified motion planning framework yields safe, fuel-efficient hop trajectories which can be tracked rapidly and with low error via MPC.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22225
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VesperMUSE: Multi-Modal Fusion Vision Transformer for Image Semantic Segmentation Under Diverse Light Conditions
2026-10-15 14:39:21Raul BalmezAbstract
Semantic segmentation is critical for the reliable navigation and scene understanding of autonomous systems, yet its performance degrades severely in low-light environments due to noise, artifacts, colour distortion, and the loss of structural details. To address this challenge, this work introduces VesperMUSE, a unified multi-modal framework designed to achieve robust image semantic segmentation across diverse illumination conditions. The architecture addresses the light deficiency problem on multiple levels: proposing a novel physics-informed synthetic low-light adaptation algorithm, approaching Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) through a thermal-guided paradigm, and finally aiming to recover the intrinsic scene details for semantic segmentation through a multi-modal fusion approach. Following enhancement, the framework dynamically integrates the primary RGB features with auxiliary thermal representations and surface normal maps highlighting geometric discontinuities and material boundaries. At the core of this integration is a highly scalable, modality-agnostic self-attention mechanism that extracts both global context and fine local features from an arbitrary number of auxiliary inputs. By combining and projecting these hierarchical multi-modal representations into a unified component, the attention module allows the network to selectively attend to relevant cross-modal cues without requiring any architectural modifications when different sensor configurations are used. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that VesperMUSE successfully recovers missing visual cues, providing a flexible, state-of-the-art (SOTA) solution for machine perception in extreme and unstructured real-world environments.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21990
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