This paper presents an end-to-end framework for reconstructing overhead power utility network topology and extracting span-level physical metadata from large-scale aerial LiDAR. The pipeline begins with semantic segmentation of the input point cloud using an improved KPConv-based model, in which data sampling and loss functions are adapted to emphasize pole and conductor (wire) classes. Network topology inference then proceeds in two stages: (i) pole instances are obtained by clustering pole-class points and validating candidates using geometric criteria, including height and verticality estimated via PCA, and (ii) candidate pole pairs are evaluated using a heuristic method and a lightweight ResNet-based classifier on 2D top-view projections of pole and wire point distributions to determine whether a physical conductor span exists. By explicitly classifying candidate spans, the approach mitigates common failure modes of heuristic connectivity rules in dense or cluttered scenes and under partial wire observation. For each validated wire, attributes regarding utility infrastructure geometry are computed, including endpoint conductor heights, ground elevation, sag-related lowest-point features, conductor arrangement, and wire width. Evaluation on multiple real-world aerial LiDAR datasets demonstrates decimeter-level endpoint height accuracy and approximately 9% relative improvement in recall for topology reconstruction compared to heuristic nearest-neighbor baselines, with larger gains in complex layouts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23915
In vision-based off-road navigation, a robot needs to know not only which obstacles to avoid but also which terrain is better. The first is handled by freespace detection or semantic segmentation. The second is usually answered with a traversability score, but no universal ground truth exists for such a score, so perception falls back on a predefined value per semantic class or a freespace confidence. These scores say what a region is, not which region a robot should prefer. We therefore formulate this preference as visual traversability ranking, an ordering of visible terrain that can be supervised by comparisons between two regions. Standard annotations do not label preference, but they imply its direction. We present TravPro, which converts these annotations into ordered region pairs and fits a small readout on frozen vision--language model (VLM) patch tokens to these pairs. The tokens are clustered once into a fixed prototype bank, and the readout learns a preference score per prototype. The readout is then applied to every patch and serves as a teacher that turns sparse comparisons into dense preference pseudo-labels without pixel-wise annotation. An RGB student distills these maps into a dense terrain-preference map together with a non-ground mask that excludes obstacles and background from the ranking. On five unseen domains, TravPro reaches a mean pairwise accuracy of 0.915 against 0.783 for the strongest baseline, producing an ordering sensitive to surface condition that a per-class value cannot represent. The same VLM and the same supervision yield no such ordering when the VLM is prompted and the supervision is used as dense targets; what matters is how they are used.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23673
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVS) of remote sensing imagery is a challenging pixel-level task requiring strong generalization and adaptation to the spatial characteristics of remote sensing data. Although existing vision-language foundation models perform well in general domains, their image-level classification design weakens the spatial priors needed for high-resolution remote sensing segmentation: structural spatial relations are degraded during deep feature transformation, and fine-grained spatial details are lost during downsampling. To address these complementary deficiencies, we propose SatOV, a training-free framework for open-vocabulary remote sensing segmentation that restores spatial priors at two stages of the representation pipeline. Specifically, Residual QQ Attention (ResQQ) extracts Query-Key self-attention from an intermediate CLIP layer and fuses it with final-layer Query-Query attention via a residual combination, restoring structural spatial priors suppressed by the final-layer representation. Spatially Modulated Upsampling (SatUp) uses the original high-resolution RGB image as spatial guidance, combining spatial feature modulation with guided cross-attention to reconstruct pixel-level textures and boundaries. Extensive experiments on DOTA, UDD, LoveDA, and Vaihingen show that SatOV consistently improves training-free OVS and achieves competitive quantitative and qualitative results against state-of-the-art methods. These results validate the effectiveness of restoring spatial priors at both the representation and spatial-resolution stages for remote sensing open-vocabulary segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22834
We present PanoSeg3R, a feed-forward framework for 3D panoramic semantic segmentation. Unlike existing methods designed for perspective inputs, PanoSeg3R jointly predicts 3D geometry and multi-view semantic segmentation in one single forward pass. Built upon a pretrained reconstruction backbone that supports panoramic images, our approach extends feed-forward 3D reconstruction with a query-based mask decoder. Furthermore, we introduce an automatic panorama data curation pipeline that leverages the complementary strengths of off-the-shelf foundation models to generate reliable pseudo semantic annotations, substantially expanding the training data and improving zero-shot generalization. PanoSeg3R achieves state-of-the-art performance on panoramic 3D semantic segmentation, improving 3D mIoU by up to 16.02 on ScanNet++, while the curated training data further improves zero-shot performance by up to 4.26 and 43.28 mIoU on Stanford2D3D and ToF-360, respectively. Website: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22687
Autonomous navigation requires precise and efficient semantic segmentation, yet existing frame-based approaches remain limited by motion blur, glare, latency, and the low temporal resolution (20-30 FPS) of conventional cameras, which leads to information loss between frames. Event cameras have emerged as an alternative sensing modality, capturing intensity changes asynchronously with high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and sparse outputs. However, event-based algorithms still fall short of frame-based ones in accuracy, as most segmentation methods are designed for dense frame data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a hybrid vision architecture that combines conventional frame-based and event-based cameras. The system integrates two complementary components: (1) a compact Spiking Neural Network (SNN) with 42k parameters for motion estimation, and (2) a lightweight event-driven SNN with 0.84M parameters for frame-based semantic segmentation, which interpolates motion between frames to refine segmentation results. By predicting inter-frame segmentations, the framework achieves segmentation rates of up to 500 Hz with an energy consumption below 1.87 mJ per inference, while maintaining real-time GPU execution at frequencies up to 200 Hz. Additionally, our approach compensates for information loss in frames affected by blur or overexposure, enabling more robust perception in challenging conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22500
Image registration is a vital preprocessing step in multimodal perception tasks, including image fusion, object detection, and semantic segmentation. In Advanced Driver- Assistance Systems (ADAS), spatial misalignment between visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) cameras -caused by non-coincident optical axes and field-of-view differences- introduces non-uniform parallax and visual ghosting. Classical keypoint-based methods are restricted to global homographies that fail under dynamic depth, while unconstrained dense flow algorithms lack structural regularization and suffer from temporal instability. In this paper, we propose XCalib, an unsupervised dense thermal-visible registration framework that bridges this gap. Rather than serving as an absolute metric calibration tool, XCalib leverages virtual pinhole camera parameterization strictly as a geometric constraint space. By optimizing effective relative pose and intrinsics alongside predicted monocular metric depth, XCalib restricts the search space of spatial displacements to physically valid projection geometries. Our key contributions are: (1) a novel registration paradigm that uses camera parameterization as an implicit regularizer for dense cross-modal warping; (2) Normalized Edges Correlation (NEC), a robust structural similarity metric tailored to cross- spectral alignment; and (3) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across public ADAS datasets, demonstrating superior temporal stability and alignment accuracy over unconstrained dense flow baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21770
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) of strip steel surface defects (S$^3$D) has posed significant challenges distinct from natural scenes. Unlike natural images, S$^3$D task exhibits unique characteristics including low local contrast, uneven illumination, and complex fine-grained texture patterns. Although recent methods based on Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown promise in FSS on natural images by leveraging SAM's powerful pre-trained representations, these unique industrial characteristics of S$^3$D images lead to performance drop when directly applying SAM to industrial defect scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Perceptual Parallel Prompt (P$^3$) framework that empowers SAM, creating the P$^3$-SAM model to address these challenges through two core strategies. First, we develop a Perceptual-Optimized Encoding (POE) strategy that enhances local contrast and preserves critical texture details for S$^3$D segmentation. Second, we introduce the Parallel Prompt Generator (PPG) strategy that simultaneously generates both semantic and spatial prompts, enabling comprehensive guidance for SAM's decoder across varying images. Extensive experiments on three few-shot S$^3$D benchmarks demonstrate that P$^3$-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly notable improvements of 12.00% in mIoU on Surface Defects-4i dataset.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21424
Producing accurate annotations for deep learning based image segmentation is both costly and labor intensive. This challenge is especially evident in wildland fire applications, where accurately labeled datasets are scarce due to the difficulty of collecting and annotating dynamic fire scenes. To address this problem, our previous work introduced the Centralized Copy-Paste Data Augmentation (CCPDA) method for semantic segmentation of wildland fire imagery, which generates artificial training samples by randomly pasting fire clusters from source images onto target images. However, random placement can produce contextually unrealistic scenes, such as fire burning on asphalt. In this paper, we present a context-aware strategy designed specifically to improve data quality and realism in small multiclass wildland fire datasets, ensuring that augmented samples remain contextually meaningful. The proposed method restricts fire placement to semantically valid target regions and selects the location whose Ash-Vegetation composition most closely matches the source context. This approach preserves existing fire regions in the target image, prevents unrealistic placements, and maintains contextual accuracy by generating images that resemble real wildland fire scenes. We evaluate the Context-Aware CCPDA strategy through numerical analysis and comparisons with other augmentation methods by a weighted sum-based multi-objective optimization (MOO) approach. The results confirm that the context-aware data augmentation strategy leads to improved segmentation performance and contextual realism, outperforming other augmentation procedures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21241
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become an effective approach for learning visual representations without manual annotations. Among SSL approaches, contrastive learning has been widely used for visual representation learning. However, existing contrastive SSL methods have focused primarily on image-level or pixel-level representation learning, while region-level representation learning remains less explored. We propose SPARC, a region-level contrastive learning framework that leverages superpixels to establish explicit correspondence between augmented image views. SPARC introduces a region contrastive branch that performs superpixel-based feature pooling and optimizes a region-level contrastive objective jointly with a global image-level objective. Under identical settings, SPARC consistently outperforms previous methods such as MoCo-v2 and DenseCL, achieving improvements of up to +9.79 mIoU for semantic segmentation and +4.88 AP for object detection. Ablation studies further demonstrate that region-level objectives produce the strongest performance. Thus, region-level contrastive learning is an effective approach for improving self-supervised visual pretraining for dense prediction tasks. Code repository can be accessed at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25067
Training-free weighted aggregation is widely used to lift 2D semantic features onto 3D Gaussians for open-vocabulary scene understanding, yet its theoretical role remains insufficiently understood. Existing analyses typically justify this operation from the rendering side, treating Gaussian features as linearly composable Euclidean variables for reconstructing 2D feature maps. However, this view does not match downstream 3D usage, where each Gaussian is often queried independently in a cosine-based embedding space. We revisit feature lifting from the 3D side and formulate per-Gaussian assignment as a cosine alignment problem on the CLIP unit sphere. Under this objective, the L2-normalized semantic back-projected feature emerges as the closed-form solution, providing a complementary interpretation of the standard lifting rule from the perspective of per-Gaussian semantic assignment. The same formulation further yields a norm decomposition into intra-view and inter-view consistency, suggesting that feature magnitude itself can serve as a semantic reliability signal. Calibrated by effective multi-view support, this reliability score guides a mode-voting refinement that preserves CLIP feature validity by avoiding linear averaging. Experiments on open-vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation show that NormLift is an efficient, training-free framework that achieves strong performance across evaluation protocols.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18898
Research on 4D millimeter-wave radar perception algorithms has flourished in recent years, extending from signal processing and object detection to semantic segmentation, motion estimation, occupancy prediction, and dynamic scene reconstruction. This review organizes the field according to the evolution of perception tasks and algorithms. It first introduces radar fundamentals, data representations, and quality-enhancement methods, and then reviews object-level perception, motion and localization, local and dense spatial perception, and dynamic scene understanding. Across these directions, we compare radar-only learning, multimodal fusion, and cross-modal supervision and knowledge distillation. Particular attention is paid to how elevation, Doppler measurements, and radar physical priors are exploited across tasks. We further summarize the task coverage, input data, annotations, and evaluation protocols of existing datasets, clarifying the empirical support for different research directions. Finally, we discuss the common challenges and future directions of 4D radar perception for autonomous driving. This review provides a task-oriented perspective on the transition from sparse object perception to dynamic spatial understanding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19216
Semantic labels for indoor mobile laser scanning (MLS) frames remain largely absent from current point cloud semantic segmentation benchmarks, which mainly focus on reconstructed indoor scenes or outdoor LiDAR perception. This paper introduces Semantic-ITC, to the best of our knowledge the first public dataset and benchmark for frame-wise indoor MLS semantic segmentation. The dataset contains 52 indoor sequences, 79,108 MLS frames, and 1.23 billion labeled points collected in classrooms, corridors, meeting rooms, offices, and study areas. Labels are attached directly to measured LiDAR points in each frame using 16 semantic classes covering structural elements, furniture, room equipment, vegetation, and other indoor objects. Semantic-ITC preserves the sparse, non-uniform, and frame-wise sampling pattern of indoor MLS, making it distinct from scene-level reconstructed point clouds and mesh-based indoor datasets. The annotations are produced by a hybrid workflow that combines predictions from a visual foundation model applied to synchronized RGB images, structural information from BIM, and manual refinement, with the final labels assigned to the original LiDAR frames. A single-frame benchmark is provided, and the best baseline reaches 79.27\% mIoU. Remaining errors are concentrated around object boundaries and ambiguous indoor classes, indicating the challenges of indoor MLS segmentation under sparse frame geometry and long-tailed class distributions. The dataset provides a public benchmark for evaluating semantic segmentation directly on measured indoor MLS frames and supports future studies on frame-wise indoor MLS semantic segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18493
Weakly supervised class-incremental semantic segmentation (WILSS) aims to train a segmentation model over multiple steps, each introducing new concepts to be learned with only image-level supervision. We introduce this http URL, an innovative approach to address catastrophic forgetting in continual learning using diffusion-based generative replay. Our framework leverages language clues to guide the diffusion process, employing self-inpainting and regularization techniques to efficiently produce replay data, aiding the learning process. By generating high-quality replay data, the information from previously learned classes can be preserved during continual updates, a critical challenge in incremental learning scenarios. To further align the statistics of replay data with those of training samples, we apply LoRAs to the generative model. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks and generative architectures, while avoiding storage of training data and the use of additional resource-demanding tools during training. The proposed technique enables an optimal tradeoff between training complexity and inference-time accuracy, making this http URL a promising solution for real-world applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18444
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance across a range of computer vision tasks, mainly thanks to the self-attention mechanism. However, its complexity, increasing quadratically with the number of tokens, remains the major obstacle to ViT efficiency and deployment at scale. Token merging reduces this cost by aggregating redundant tokens. Yet existing methods are typically evaluated within a single architecture, leaving open whether their effectiveness stems from the merging mechanism itself or from the specific decoder they are paired with. We extend Graph-Guided Token Merging (G2TM), a single module inserted early in a ViT-based network, beyond its original Segmenter setting. We evaluate G2TM across three semantic segmentation frameworks (Segmenter, SETR, EoMT) and three decoder families (Linear, Transformer-, convolution-based), as well as standard ViT image classification. Our results show that G2TM's behavior and accuracy-efficiency trade-off are consistent across every tested architecture for a given backbone size, indicating that its effectiveness is a property of the encoder rather than the decoder. G2TM also generalizes well to image classification, achieving an even smaller degradation in accuracy compared to semantic segmentation. We further find that G2TM's optimal hyperparameters, resulting in a consistent drop in GFLOPs of 22-47% and an increase in throughput by up to 74% for segmentation models on ADE20K dataset, depend primarily on the backbone's pre-training recipe and on the target dataset, rather than on the decoder choice.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18279
Underwater semantic segmentation is essential for marine ecosystem monitoring, yet remains challenging due to severe visual degradation. Light absorption and scattering often lead to color shifts, low contrast, and blurred boundaries, making shallow detail features unreliable. Existing underwater segmentation methods improve RGB feature aggregation or boundary prediction, but still lack an explicit mechanism to distinguish structure-related details from degradation-induced responses. To address this limitation, we propose GeoCueFormer, a lightweight framework that combines geometry-constrained frequency enhancement with prediction-cued refinement. GeoCueFormer performs stage-specific wavelet enhancement on hierarchical encoder features to complement shallow boundary details while preserving deep structural semantics. A depth-derived spatial gate constrains shallow frequency enhancement toward geometry-consistent regions, and a prediction-cued dual-stage decoder further refines ambiguous high-resolution features. GeoCueFormer obtains 82.23% and 73.04% mIoU on SUIM and DUT, respectively. Under comparable model complexity and standard benchmark settings on SUIM and DUT, it achieves SOTA performance while maintaining a favorable accuracy-complexity trade-off. These results show that distinguishing structural details from degradation-induced interference is more effective for underwater segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18069
This paper investigates easy strategies to boost the performance of existing networks for lidar semantic scene completion (SSC) without requiring complex architectural redesigns. The fact is that, over the last years, SSC methods have mostly pursued architectural innovations, making the models heavier and more complex, e.g., by jointly training a point cloud semantic segmentation branch. In this work, we take a step back and explore two priors used as simple ingredients (possibly noisy) to improve existing approaches: semantic pseudo-labels and sensor visibility information. Concretely, we provide both kinds of information directly as additional inputs to a given SSC network, requiring only a minimal adaptation of the original architecture. We first demonstrate that endowing input point clouds with semantic pseudo-labels from off-the-shelf segmenters significantly improves the performance of existing SSC models. In fact, by evaluating these models against an oracle, we establish that high-quality semantic priors are a primary driver of semantic gains (mIoU), and that the SSC model can be trained just once with ground-truth semantics and then exploited without retraining using any segmenter. Furthermore, we equip the input lidar point cloud with visibility information that distinguishes between empty spaces (between the lidar and a scanned point) and unknown spaces (outside of lines of sight), providing a secondary performance boost across the tested architectures. We study the design space of data for representing visibility information and bound the remaining headroom with a ground-truth oracle on the free-space labels. On SemanticKITTI, these enhancements make older models competitive with state-of-the-art systems across four architectures, in one case even outperforming them. On the SSCBench-nuScenes benchmark, both priors also transfer with the sparser 32-beam sensor.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17413
With the increasing deployment of deep neural networks in critical systems, such as medical diagnostics and autonomous vehicles, ensuring their interpretability is crucial to building trust in decision-making systems. In the field of explainable artificial intelligence, prototype-based reasoning has gained particular popularity, as it mimics human cognitive processes by explaining model decisions based on visual similarity under the looks like this paradigm. While this paradigm has been thoroughly investigated in the context of global image classification, the interpretability of dense predictions, particularly semantic segmentation, remains largely unexplored despite its immense importance in tasks requiring precise object localization. Existing prototype-based interpretable segmentation models rely on ante-hoc architectures, which entails significant limitations because they require costly training from scratch and modifications to the network structure, ultimately leading to a noticeable drop in predictive performance compared to standard black-box models. To address this issue, we propose PiPS (Post-hoc interpretable Prototypical Segmentation), the first fully post-hoc solution for generating prototypical explanations for semantic segmentation models. Our method enables the extraction of intuitive, spatially localized explanations from any pre-trained network without modification or fine-tuning, thereby preserving 100% of the model's original predictive performance. This approach opens a new avenue for the safe and cost-effective deployment of transparent systems in advanced computer vision tasks. Codebase available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16909
Pediatric brain tumors are a leading cause of cancer-related mortality in children, and their small, rare, and often low-contrast subregions make accurate manual delineation challenging. Reliable automated segmentation is therefore needed to support diagnosis, treatment planning, and response assessment. Accordingly, we introduce NeuroTS-Net, a three-dimensional encoder-decoder convolutional neural network architecture for multi-class semantic segmentation that incorporates a dual-scale raw-detail stream, adaptive low-resolution context selection, and detail-preserving multipath downsampling. These components preserve fine intensity and boundary information while efficiently modeling broader tumor context. NeuroTS-Net was trained on the BraTS 2026 pediatric dataset without external data or pretrained weights and evaluated against nnU-Net and MedNeXt under the same experimental protocol. NeuroTS-Net outperformed the baseline methods, achieving whole-tumor and tumor-core Dice scores of 0.938 and 0.937 on the internal validation set and 0.927 and 0.926 on the official challenge validation set. The code is open-sourced at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16873
State space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have emerged as efficient alternatives to attention-based architectures and have been extended to vision through ViM, VMamba, and Visual State Space Duality (VSSD). Yet the low-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) behavior of VSSD remains insufficiently understood. A weight-activation split on VSSD-Tiny identifies activation quantization as the dominant low-bit bottleneck, while representative inputs to selected VSSD-backbone linear layers exhibit strong channel-wise magnitude variation and token-localized extremes. We propose the Channel-wise Token-balanced Output-Aware Clipping (CTOAC) method, which learns per-input-channel clipping bounds by minimizing a token-balanced reconstruction loss on the corresponding linear outputs. Only the selected linear layers and their input activations are quantized; other backbone operations retain their original precision. Across VSSD-Tiny, VSSD-Small, and VSSD-Base, the proposed CTOAC method retains ImageNet-1K accuracy and remains substantially more robust than the evaluated baselines at more aggressive precision settings. Applying the same quantization scope to VSSD backbones on COCO and ADE20K preserves strong object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation performance. An optimized RTX 4090 deployment configuration achieves up to 1.42x end-to-end speedup over FP32.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16656
Accurate marine pollution detection (MPD) is essential for protecting coastal ecosystems and marine biodiversity. Vision Mamba models have shown promise in remote-sensing semantic segmentation by efficiently capturing long-range dependencies and global context, yet their potential for MPD remains underexplored. MPD is particularly challenging because of low signal-to-noise ratios, fragmented pollution patterns, and indistinct boundaries caused by the visual similarity between pollutants and the surrounding sea. To address these issues, we propose MambaMPD, an enhanced Mamba-based framework incorporating two complementary structural priors: Frequency-Aware Augmentation (FAA) and multi-scale Edge-Guided Attention (EGA). FAA integrates wavelet transforms into the encoder to decompose features into multi-scale frequency subbands, enabling the model to capture low-frequency contextual semantics and high-frequency structural details needed to identify small, low-contrast, and irregular pollution patterns. EGA adaptively fuses hierarchical, Laplacian-derived boundary cues with deep semantic representations, refining encoder features before decoding to sharpen boundaries and reduce ambiguity in visually confusing, spatially fragmented scenes. Together, these modules improve sensitivity to subtle pollution signals while preserving fine boundary structures. A U-Net-style decoder with squeeze-and-excitation attention and deep supervision progressively restores and refines semantic and spatial information across scales. Extensive experiments on two benchmark MPD datasets show that MambaMPD achieves higher mIoU than competing methods while requiring substantially less computation than foundation-model-based approaches. On MADOS, it improves F1 by 3.6% over OSDMamba; on M4D, it raises Oil Spill IoU by 6.82% over TransOilSeg.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15676