English

Prototype-Based Low Altitude UAV Semantic Segmentation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-03 v1

Abstract

Semantic segmentation of low-altitude UAV imagery presents unique challenges due to extreme scale variations, complex object boundaries, and limited computational resources on edge devices. Existing transformer-based segmentation methods achieve remarkable performance but incur high computational overhead, while lightweight approaches struggle to capture fine-grained details in high-resolution aerial scenes. To address these limitations, we propose PBSeg, an efficient prototype-based segmentation framework tailored for UAV applications. PBSeg introduces a novel prototype-based cross-attention (PBCA) that exploits feature redundancy to reduce computational complexity while maintaining segmentation quality. The framework incorporates an efficient multi-scale feature extraction module that combines deformable convolutions (DConv) with context-aware modulation (CAM) to capture both local details and global semantics. Experiments on two challenging UAV datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. PBSeg achieves 71.86\% mIoU on UAVid and 80.92\% mIoU on UDD6, establishing competitive performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangda1018/PBSeg.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.01550,
  title  = {Prototype-Based Low Altitude UAV Semantic Segmentation},
  author = {Da Zhang and Gao Junyu and Zhao Zhiyuan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.01550},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ICME 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:50:11.174Z