# SAM-Aug: Leveraging SAM Priors for Few-Shot Parcel Segmentation in Satellite Time Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09110 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09110/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Self-supervised Augmentation Consistency for Adapting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00097/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Segmentation of Satellite Image Time Series with Convolutional Temporal Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07933/) (2021)
- [The Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Remote Sensing Applications: From Zero to One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16623/) (2023)
- [ViTs for SITS: Vision Transformers for Satellite Image Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04944/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Temporal Attention Models for Crop Mapping from Satellite Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07558/) (2021)
- [SmooSeg: Smoothness Prior for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17874/) (2023)
- [Towards the Uncharted: Density-Descending Feature Perturbation for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06462/) (2024)
- [Convolutional LSTMs for Cloud-Robust Segmentation of Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02471/) (2018)
- [Exploring Robust Features for Few-Shot Object Detection in Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05381/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Computer Vision Technologies In Urban and Controlled-environment Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11318/) (2022)
- [Unlocking the capabilities of explainable fewshot learning in remote sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08619/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PhenoStitch: Training-Free Panoptic Crop Mapping from Satellite Image Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00870/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot semantic segmentation of time-series remote sensing images remains a critical challenge, particularly in regions where labeled data is scarce or costly to obtain. While state-of-the-art models perform well under full supervision, their performance degrades significantly under limited labeling, limiting their real-world applicability. In this work, we propose SAM-Aug, a new annotation-efficient framework that leverages the geometry-aware segmentation capability of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to improve few-shot land cover mapping. Our approach constructs cloud-free composite images from temporal sequences and applies SAM in a fully unsupervised manner to generate geometry-aware mask priors. These priors are then integrated into training through a proposed loss function called RegionSmoothLoss, which enforces prediction consistency within each SAM-derived region across temporal frames, effectively regularizing the model to respect semantically coherent structures. Extensive experiments on the PASTIS-R benchmark under a 5 percent labeled setting demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of SAM-Aug. Averaged over three random seeds (42, 2025, 4090), our method achieves a mean test mIoU of 36.21 percent, outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline by +2.33 percentage points, a relative improvement of 6.89 percent. Notably, on the most favorable split (seed=42), SAM-Aug reaches a test mIoU of 40.28 percent, representing an 11.2 percent relative gain with no additional labeled data. The consistent improvement across all seeds confirms the generalization power of leveraging foundation model priors under annotation scarcity. Our results highlight that vision models like SAM can serve as useful regularizers in few-shot remote sensing learning, offering a scalable and plug-and-play solution for land cover monitoring without requiring manual annotations or model fine-tuning.