English

MSCloudCAM: Multi-Scale Context Adaptation with Convolutional Cross-Attention for Multispectral Cloud Segmentation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-01-28 v4 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Clouds remain a major obstacle in optical satellite imaging, limiting accurate environmental and climate analysis. To address the strong spectral variability and the large scale differences among cloud types, we propose MSCloudCAM, a novel multi-scale context adapter network with convolution based cross-attention tailored for multispectral and multi-sensor cloud segmentation. A key contribution of MSCloudCAM is the explicit modeling of multiple complementary multi-scale context extractors. And also, rather than simply stacking or concatenating their outputs, our formulation uses one extractor's fine-resolution features and the other extractor's global contextual representations enabling dynamic, scale-aware feature selection. Building on this idea, we design a new convolution-based cross attention adapter that effectively fuses localized, detailed information with broader multi-scale context. Integrated with a hierarchical vision backbone and refined through channel and spatial attention mechanisms, MSCloudCAM achieves strong spectral-spatial discrimination. Experiments on various multisensor datatsets e.g. CloudSEN12 (Sentinel-2) and L8Biome (Landsat-8), demonstrate that MSCloudCAM achieves superior overall segmentation performance and competitive class-wise accuracy compared to recent state-of-the-art models, while maintaining competitive model complexity, highlighting the novelty and effectiveness of the proposed design for large-scale Earth observation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.10802,
  title  = {MSCloudCAM: Multi-Scale Context Adaptation with Convolutional Cross-Attention for Multispectral Cloud Segmentation},
  author = {Md Abdullah Al Mazid and Liangdong Deng and Naphtali Rishe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10802},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 Figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:32:41.334Z