LSCF: Long-Term Semantic-Guidance ConvFormer for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

Referring remote sensing image segmentation (RRSIS) task aims to generate segmentation masks for target objects based on language descriptions. It requires precise localization while distinguishing between visually similar yet semantically distinct objects. Fusing vision-language features only during extraction causes information loss and semantic forgetting in the decoder, harming similar target distinction. In addition, high-resolution remote sensing images present challenges, including complex backgrounds, diverse object scales, and intricate boundaries, limiting the effectiveness of previous methods. To address these issues, we propose the long-term semantic-guidance ConvFormer (LSCF) Network. First, we fuse multireceptive-field local features extracted by the multiscale coordconv (MCC) module with language-aware global features from the cross-modal attention (CA) module to obtain multimodal representations. Second, the sampling attention (SA) module enables fine-grained vision context alignment under semantic guidance. Finally, the global language fusion (GLF) module is incorporated in the decoder to maintain long-term vision-language alignment and mitigate semantic degradation. Experimental validation on the RefSegRS, RRSIS-D, and RISBench datasets demonstrates that LSCF achieves overall intersection of union (oIoU) scores of 83.27%, 77.42%, and 74.88%, and mean intersection over union (mIoU) scores of 77.44%, 64.25%, and 68.53%, respectively. On RefSegRS, LSCF surpasses the SOTA method FIANet by 5.53% (oIoU) and 9.58% (mIoU), while delivering competitive performance on RRSIS-D and RISBench. Code and experimental configurations will be released.