LiDAR Remote Sensing Meets Weak Supervision: Concepts, Methods, and Perspectives
It tackles the scalability and spatiotemporal adaptability issues in LiDAR remote sensing for researchers and practitioners, but is incremental as it provides a systematic review rather than new methods.
This paper reviews how Weakly Supervised Learning (WSL) can address the high labeling costs in LiDAR remote sensing by unifying data interpretation and parameter inversion tasks, enabling robust learning from limited annotations like sparse points or noisy labels.
Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) remote sensing encompasses two major directions: data interpretation and parameter inversion. However, both directions rely heavily on costly and labor-intensive labeled data and field measurements, which constrains their scalability and spatiotemporal adaptability. Weakly Supervised Learning (WSL) provides a unified framework to address these limitations. This paper departs from the traditional view that treats interpretation and inversion as separate tasks and offers a systematic review of recent advances in LiDAR remote sensing from a unified WSL perspective. We cover typical WSL settings including incomplete supervision(e.g., sparse point labels), inexact supervision (e.g., scene-level tags), inaccurate supervision (e.g., noisy labels), and cross-domain supervision (e.g., domain adaptation/generalization) and corresponding techniques such as pseudo-labeling, consistency regularization, self-training, and label refinement, which collectively enable robust learning from limited and weak annotations.We further analyze LiDAR-specific challenges (e.g., irregular geometry, data sparsity, domain heterogeneity) that require tailored weak supervision, and examine how sparse LiDAR observations can guide joint learning with other remote-sensing data for continuous surface-parameter retrieval. Finally, we highlight future directions where WSL acts as a bridge between LiDAR and foundation models to leverage large-scale multimodal datasets and reduce labeling costs, while also enabling broader WSL-driven advances in generalization, open-world adaptation, and scalable LiDAR remote sensing.