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Main Authors: Gui, Yuanyuan, Li, Wei, Wang, Yinjian, Xia, Xiang-Gen, Marty, Mauro, Ginzler, Christian, Wang, Zuyuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04870
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author Gui, Yuanyuan
Li, Wei
Wang, Yinjian
Xia, Xiang-Gen
Marty, Mauro
Ginzler, Christian
Wang, Zuyuan
author_facet Gui, Yuanyuan
Li, Wei
Wang, Yinjian
Xia, Xiang-Gen
Marty, Mauro
Ginzler, Christian
Wang, Zuyuan
contents Recent advances in semantic segmentation of multi-modal remote sensing images have significantly improved the accuracy of tree cover mapping, supporting applications in urban planning, forest monitoring, and ecological assessment. Integrating data from multiple modalities-such as optical imagery, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-has shown superior performance over single-modality methods. However, these data are often acquired days or even months apart, during which various changes may occur, such as vegetation disturbances (e.g., logging, and wildfires) and variations in imaging quality. Such temporal misalignments introduce cross-modal uncertainty, especially in high-resolution imagery, which can severely degrade segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose MURTreeFormer, a novel multi-modal segmentation framework that mitigates and leverages aleatoric uncertainty for robust tree cover mapping. MURTreeFormer treats one modality as primary and others as auxiliary, explicitly modeling patch-level uncertainty in the auxiliary modalities via a probabilistic latent representation. Uncertain patches are identified and reconstructed from the primary modality's distribution through a VAE-based resampling mechanism, producing enhanced auxiliary features for fusion. In the decoder, a gradient magnitude attention (GMA) module and a lightweight refinement head (RH) are further integrated to guide attention toward tree-like structures and to preserve fine-grained spatial details. Extensive experiments on multi-modal datasets from Shanghai and Zurich demonstrate that MURTreeFormer significantly improves segmentation performance and effectively reduces the impact of temporally induced aleatoric uncertainty.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04870
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-modal Uncertainty Robust Tree Cover Segmentation For High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images
Gui, Yuanyuan
Li, Wei
Wang, Yinjian
Xia, Xiang-Gen
Marty, Mauro
Ginzler, Christian
Wang, Zuyuan
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent advances in semantic segmentation of multi-modal remote sensing images have significantly improved the accuracy of tree cover mapping, supporting applications in urban planning, forest monitoring, and ecological assessment. Integrating data from multiple modalities-such as optical imagery, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-has shown superior performance over single-modality methods. However, these data are often acquired days or even months apart, during which various changes may occur, such as vegetation disturbances (e.g., logging, and wildfires) and variations in imaging quality. Such temporal misalignments introduce cross-modal uncertainty, especially in high-resolution imagery, which can severely degrade segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose MURTreeFormer, a novel multi-modal segmentation framework that mitigates and leverages aleatoric uncertainty for robust tree cover mapping. MURTreeFormer treats one modality as primary and others as auxiliary, explicitly modeling patch-level uncertainty in the auxiliary modalities via a probabilistic latent representation. Uncertain patches are identified and reconstructed from the primary modality's distribution through a VAE-based resampling mechanism, producing enhanced auxiliary features for fusion. In the decoder, a gradient magnitude attention (GMA) module and a lightweight refinement head (RH) are further integrated to guide attention toward tree-like structures and to preserve fine-grained spatial details. Extensive experiments on multi-modal datasets from Shanghai and Zurich demonstrate that MURTreeFormer significantly improves segmentation performance and effectively reduces the impact of temporally induced aleatoric uncertainty.
title Multi-modal Uncertainty Robust Tree Cover Segmentation For High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04870