A Unified Framework With Multimodal Fine-Tuning for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal remote sensing data, acquired from diverse sensors, offer a comprehensive and integrated perspective of the Earth’s surface. Leveraging multimodal fusion techniques, semantic segmentation enables detailed and accurate analysis of geographic scenes, surpassing single-modality approaches. Building on advancements in vision foundation models, particularly the segment anything model (SAM), this study proposes a unified framework incorporating a novel multimodal fine-tuning network (MFNet) for remote sensing semantic segmentation. The proposed framework is designed to seamlessly integrate with various fine-tuning mechanisms, demonstrated through the inclusion of Adapter and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) as representative examples. This extensibility ensures the framework’s adaptability to other emerging fine-tuning strategies, allowing models to retain SAM’s general knowledge while effectively leveraging multimodal data. Additionally, a pyramid-based deep fusion module (DFM) is introduced to integrate high-level geographic features across multiple scales, enhancing feature representation prior to decoding. This work also highlights SAM’s robust generalization capabilities with digital surface model (DSM) data, a novel application. Extensive experiments on three benchmark multimodal remote sensing datasets, ISPRS Vaihingen, ISPRS Potsdam, and MMHunan, demonstrate that the proposed MFNet significantly outperforms existing methods in multimodal semantic segmentation, setting a new standard in the field while offering a versatile foundation for future research and applications. The source code for this work is accessible at https://github.com/sstary/SSRS.