# GABI: Geometry-Aware Boundary Integration for Spacecraft Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00886 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00886/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [ENet: A Deep Neural Network Architecture for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02147/) (2016)
- [Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05740/) (2019)
- [ESPNet: Efficient Spatial Pyramid of Dilated Convolutions for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06815/) (2018)
- [Fast-SCNN: Fast Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04502/) (2019)
- [SegFix: Model-Agnostic Boundary Refinement for Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04269/) (2020)
- [Learning Attraction Field Representation for Robust Line Segment Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02122/) (2018)
- [Robust Multi-Task Learning and Online Refinement for Spacecraft Pose Estimation across Domain Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04275/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning-Based Monocular Spacecraft Pose Estimation: Current State, Limitations and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07348/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Learning-Based Pose Estimation of Noncooperative Spacecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00392/) (2019)
- [A Spacecraft Dataset for Detection, Segmentation and Parts Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08186/) (2021)
- [Distance transform regression for spatially-aware deep semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01671/) (2019)
- [SEMEDA: Enhancing Segmentation Precision with Semantic Edge Aware Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01892/) (2019)
- [NeRF-based Visualization of 3D Cues Supporting Data-Driven Spacecraft Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14890/) (2025)
- [A New Dataset and Performance Benchmark for Real-time Spacecraft Segmentation in Onboard Computers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10775/) (2025)

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

- [GeoDistill-Refine: Silhouette-First Geometry Distillation for Annotation-Free Spacecraft Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07405/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate segmentation is crucial for autonomous spacecraft, as it directly affects downstream tasks related to 3D situational awareness. The harsh illumination conditions of space, however, produce images with high variability in appearance, hindering the generalization of segmentation approaches across different spacecraft and environments. In this work, we propose GABI, a lightweight boundary-aware multi-task segmentation architecture that augments a convolutional backbone with an auxiliary distance-field prediction head. The distance field provides dense geometric supervision around object boundaries, encouraging the network to learn spatially consistent representations of spacecraft structures while maintaining low model complexity suitable for onboard perception systems. We evaluated GABI against both an established convolutional baseline and a heavier transformer-based architecture. On the SPARK benchmark, distance-field supervision improves the baseline by up to 5% in Average Precision while achieving performance comparable to the transformer models. In generalization experiments, GABI improves Average Precision by more than 50% over the baseline. In cross-domain evaluation, the lightweight GABI variant performs within 5% in IoU and F1-score of the heavier transformer model while being approximately ten times smaller. At the same time, the heavier GABI variant surpasses the transformer architectures while remaining nearly three times lighter.