MetaSegNet: Metadata-collaborative Vision-Language Representation Learning for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images
This addresses the problem of limited multimodal information use in remote sensing segmentation for applications like land mapping, though it is incremental by combining existing vision-language methods with metadata.
The authors tackled semantic segmentation of remote sensing images by integrating metadata-derived text prompts with visual data, achieving competitive results such as 70.4% mIoU on OpenEarthMap and 93.3% mean F1 score on Potsdam.
Semantic segmentation of remote sensing images plays a vital role in a wide range of Earth Observation applications, such as land use land cover mapping, environment monitoring, and sustainable development. Driven by rapid developments in artificial intelligence, deep learning (DL) has emerged as the mainstream for semantic segmentation and has achieved many breakthroughs in the field of remote sensing. However, most DL-based methods focus on unimodal visual data while ignoring rich multimodal information involved in the real world. Non-visual data, such as text, can gather extra knowledge from the real world, which can strengthen the interpretability, reliability, and generalization of visual models. Inspired by this, we propose a novel metadata-collaborative segmentation network (MetaSegNet) that applies vision-language representation learning for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. Unlike the common model structure that only uses unimodal visual data, we extract the key characteristic (e.g. the climate zone) from freely available remote sensing image metadata and transfer it into geographic text prompts via the generic ChatGPT. Then, we construct an image encoder, a text encoder, and a crossmodal attention fusion subnetwork to extract the image and text feature and apply image-text interaction. Benefiting from such a design, the proposed MetaSegNet not only demonstrates superior generalization in zero-shot testing but also achieves competitive accuracy with the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods on the large-scale OpenEarthMap dataset (70.4% mIoU) and the Potsdam dataset (93.3% mean F1 score) as well as the LoveDA dataset (52.0% mIoU).