# A Novel Transformer Based Semantic Segmentation Scheme for Fine-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12137 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12137/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Bottleneck Transformers for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11605/) (2021)
- [Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07853/) (2020)
- [Large Kernel Matters -- Improve Semantic Segmentation by Global Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02719/) (2017)
- [Beyond RGB: Very High Resolution Urban Remote Sensing With Multimodal Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08681/) (2017)
- [Multi-Attention-Network for Semantic Segmentation of Fine Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02130/) (2020)
- [Classification With an Edge: Improving Semantic Image Segmentation with Boundary Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01337/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Dense Semantic Labelling of High-Resolution Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02585/) (2016)
- [Multi-stage Attention ResU-Net for Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14302/) (2020)
- [ABCNet: Attentive Bilateral Contextual Network for Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02531/) (2021)
- [Semantic Labeling in Very High Resolution Images via a Self-Cascaded Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11236/) (2018)
- [Dense Dilated Convolutions Merging Network for Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04027/) (2020)
- [Land Cover Classification from Remote Sensing Images Based on Multi-Scale Fully Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00168/) (2020)
- [MACU-Net for Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remotely Sensed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13083/) (2020)
- [Scale-aware Neural Network for Semantic Segmentation of Multi-resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07935/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [UNetFormer: A UNet-like Transformer for Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Urban Scene Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08937/) (2021)
- [MTP: Advancing Remote Sensing Foundation Model via Multi-Task Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13430/) (2024)
- [SAMRS: Scaling-up Remote Sensing Segmentation Dataset with Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02034/) (2023)
- [SAM-Assisted Remote Sensing Imagery Semantic Segmentation with Object and Boundary Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02464/) (2023)
- [Transformer Meets Convolution: A Bilateral Awareness Network for Semantic Segmentation of Very Fine Resolution Urban Scene Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12413/) (2021)
- [What a MESS: Multi-Domain Evaluation of Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15521/) (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)
- [SFFNet: A Wavelet-Based Spatial and Frequency Domain Fusion Network for Remote Sensing Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01992/) (2024)
- [PyramidMamba: Rethinking Pyramid Feature Fusion with Selective Space State Model for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10828/) (2024)
- [Prototype-Driven Structure Synergy Network for Remote Sensing Images Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04022/) (2025)
- [Hi-ResNet: Edge Detail Enhancement for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12691/) (2023)
- [Learning without Exact Guidance: Updating Large-scale High-resolution Land Cover Maps from Low-resolution Historical Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02746/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Frequency Enhancement Network for Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02647/) (2025)
- [Few-Shot Rotation-Invariant Aerial Image Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11734/) (2023)
- [LOGCAN++: Adaptive Local-global class-aware network for semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16502/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Dictionary Learning for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06683/) (2025)
- [FSDENet: A Frequency and Spatial Domains based Detail Enhancement Network for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00059/) (2025)
- [LSwinSR: UAV Imagery Super-Resolution based on Linear Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10232/) (2023)
- [MetaSegNet: Metadata-collaborative Vision-Language Representation Learning for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12735/) (2023)
- [Generalized Few-Shot Meets Remote Sensing: Discovering Novel Classes in Land Cover Mapping via Hybrid Semantic Segmentation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12721/) (2024)
- [Vision Mamba in Remote Sensing: A Comprehensive Survey of Techniques, Applications and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00630/) (2025)
- [UNetMamba: An Efficient UNet-Like Mamba for Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11545/) (2024)
- [Efficient Remote Sensing Segmentation With Generative Adversarial Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01292/) (2023)
- [LoG-CAN: local-global Class-aware Network for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07747/) (2023)
- [General-Purpose Multimodal Transformer meets Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03388/) (2023)
- [Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation Quality Assessment based on Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13990/) (2025)
- [HQF-Net: A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Multi-Scale Fusion Network for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06715/) (2026)
- [LOANet: A Lightweight Network Using Object Attention for Extracting Buildings and Roads from UAV Aerial Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08490/) (2022)
- [Semantic Segmentation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Remote Sensing Images using SegFormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01092/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The fully convolutional network (FCN) with an encoder-decoder architecture has been the standard paradigm for semantic segmentation. The encoder-decoder architecture utilizes an encoder to capture multilevel feature maps, which are incorporated into the final prediction by a decoder. As the context is crucial for precise segmentation, tremendous effort has been made to extract such information in an intelligent fashion, including employing dilated/atrous convolutions or inserting attention modules. However, these endeavors are all based on the FCN architecture with ResNet or other backbones, which cannot fully exploit the context from the theoretical concept. By contrast, we introduce the Swin Transformer as the backbone to extract the context information and design a novel decoder of densely connected feature aggregation module (DCFAM) to restore the resolution and produce the segmentation map. The experimental results on two remotely sensed semantic segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.Code is available at https://github.com/WangLibo1995/GeoSeg