CroBIM-U: Uncertainty-Driven Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

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Authors: Yuzhe Sun, Zhe Dong, Haochen Jiang, Yanfeng Gu, Tianzhu Liu
Cited by: 2
References: 50

Abstract

Referring remote sensing image segmentation aims to localize specific targets described by natural language within complex overhead imagery. However, due to extreme scale variations, dense similar distractors, and intricate boundary structures, the reliability of cross-modal alignment exhibits significant spatial non-uniformity. Existing methods typically employ uniform fusion and refinement strategies across the entire image, which often introduces unnecessary linguistic perturbations in visually clear regions while failing to provide sufficient disambiguation in confused areas. To address this, we propose an uncertainty-guided framework that explicitly leverages a pixel-wise referring uncertainty map as a spatial prior to orchestrate adaptive inference. Specifically, we introduce a plug-and-play Referring Uncertainty Scorer (RUS), which is trained via an online error-consistency supervision strategy to interpretably predict the spatial distribution of referential ambiguity. Building on this prior, we design two plug-and-play modules: 1) Uncertainty-Gated Fusion (UGF), which dynamically modulates language injection strength to enhance constraints in high-uncertainty regions while suppressing noise in low-uncertainty ones; and 2) Uncertainty-Driven Local Refinement (UDLR), which utilizes uncertainty-derived soft masks to focus refinement on error-prone boundaries and fine details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method functions as a unified, plug-and-play solution that significantly improves robustness and geometric fidelity in complex remote sensing scenes without altering the backbone architecture.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Multimodal Machine Learning Applications Advanced Neural Network Applications Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Volume
64
Pages
1–16
Publication date
1 January 2026