# Magnifier: A Multi-grained Neural Network-based Architecture for Burned Area Delineation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19589 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19589/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

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- [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)
- [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)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [DeepGlobe 2018: A Challenge to Parse the Earth through Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06561/) (2018)
- [Unified Focal loss: Generalising Dice and cross entropy-based losses to handle class imbalanced medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04525/) (2021)
- [reBEN: Refined BigEarthNet Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03653/) (2024)
- [Global canopy height regression and uncertainty estimation from GEDI LIDAR waveforms with deep ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03975/) (2021)
- [Semantic Segmentation of Earth Observation Data Using Multimodal and Multi-scale Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06846/) (2016)
- [CaBuAr: California Burned Areas dataset for delineation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11519/) (2024)
- [KAN You See It? KANs and Sentinel for Effective and Explainable Crop Field Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07040/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In crisis management and remote sensing, image segmentation plays a crucial role, enabling tasks like disaster response and emergency planning by analyzing visual data. Neural networks are able to analyze satellite acquisitions and determine which areas were affected by a catastrophic event. The problem in their development in this context is the data scarcity and the lack of extensive benchmark datasets, limiting the capabilities of training large neural network models. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology, namely Magnifier, to improve segmentation performance with limited data availability. The Magnifier methodology is applicable to any existing encoder-decoder architecture, as it extends a model by merging information at different contextual levels through a dual-encoder approach: a local and global encoder. Magnifier analyzes the input data twice using the dual-encoder approach. In particular, the local and global encoders extract information from the same input at different granularities. This allows Magnifier to extract more information than the other approaches given the same set of input images. Magnifier improves the quality of the results of +2.65% on average IoU while leading to a restrained increase in terms of the number of trainable parameters compared to the original model. We evaluated our proposed approach with state-of-the-art burned area segmentation models, demonstrating, on average, comparable or better performances in less than half of the GFLOPs.
