# ABCNet: Attentive Bilateral Contextual Network for Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02531/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09925/) (2019)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [BiSeNet V2: Bilateral Network with Guided Aggregation for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02147/) (2020)
- [ResUNet-a: a deep learning framework for semantic segmentation of remotely sensed data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00592/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [A Novel Transformer Based Semantic Segmentation Scheme for Fine-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12137/) (2021)
- [LSKNet: A Foundation Lightweight Backbone for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11735/) (2024)
- [Transformer Meets Convolution: A Bilateral Awareness Network for Semantic Segmentation of Very Fine Resolution Urban Scene Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12413/) (2021)
- [Graph Information Bottleneck for Remote Sensing Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02545/) (2023)
- [AerialFormer: Multi-resolution Transformer for Aerial Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06842/) (2023)
- [Building extraction with vision transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15637/) (2021)
- [Not Just Learning from Others but Relying on Yourself: A New Perspective on Few-Shot Segmentation in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12452/) (2023)
- [SBSS: Stacking-Based Semantic Segmentation Framework for Very High Resolution Remote Sensing Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07623/) (2022)
- [Vision Mamba in Remote Sensing: A Comprehensive Survey of Techniques, Applications and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00630/) (2025)
- [Scale-aware Neural Network for Semantic Segmentation of Multi-resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07935/) (2021)
- [AeroReformer: Aerial Referring Transformer for UAV-based Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16680/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Semantic Segmentation: A Brief Survey & Comparative Study in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06047/) (2023)
- [Semantic Labeling of High Resolution Images Using EfficientUNets and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09731/) (2022)
- [MKANet: A Lightweight Network with Sobel Boundary Loss for Efficient Land-cover Classification of Satellite Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13866/) (2022)
- [ClassWise-CRF: Category-Specific Fusion for Enhanced Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21491/) (2025)
- [Mapping and Classification of Trees Outside Forests using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25239/) (2025)
- [SpecAware: A Spectral-Content Aware Foundation Model for Unifying Multi-Sensor Learning in Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27219/) (2025)
- [A2-FPN for Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remotely Sensed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07997/) (2021)
- [Global-Local Detail Guided Transformer for Sea Ice Recognition in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13197/) (2024)
- [Threshold Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07984/) (2025)
- [Baltimore Atlas: FreqWeaver Adapter for Semi-supervised Ultra-high Spatial Resolution Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15565/) (2025)
- [BASeg: Boundary-Aware Remote Sensing Segmentation with Structural Penalties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15683/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images plays a crucial role in precision agriculture, environmental protection, and economic assessment. In recent years, substantial fine-resolution remote sensing images are available for semantic segmentation. However, due to the complicated information caused by the increased spatial resolution, state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms normally utilize complex network architectures for segmentation, which usually incurs high computational complexity. Specifically, the high-caliber performance of the convolutional neural network (CNN) heavily relies on fine-grained spatial details (fine resolution) and sufficient contextual information (large receptive fields), both of which trigger high computational costs. This crucially impedes their practicability and availability in real-world scenarios that require real-time processing. In this paper, we propose an Attentive Bilateral Contextual Network (ABCNet), a convolutional neural network (CNN) with double branches, with prominently lower computational consumptions compared to the cutting-edge algorithms, while maintaining a competitive accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/lironui/ABCNet.