Evaluating Semantic and Spatial Guidance for Foundation Model Segmentation of Small-Scale PV in Remote Sensing Imagery

Spatio-temporal PV data are essential for understanding adoption processes in off-grid regions, yet such data remain largely unavailable. Automated segmentation of remote sensing (RS) imagery offers a promising solution; yet, residential PV systems remain challenging targets because of their small size and sparse distribution, resulting in severe target-background imbalance. Vision-language foundation models (FMs) provide a data-efficient paradigm through prompt-based semantic and spatial guidance, but the relative contribution of different prompt types remains unclear. We systematically evaluate SAM3 for small-scale PV segmentation in RS imagery by comparing textual, geometric, and hybrid prompting, under varying supervision levels, training strategies, spatial resolutions, and imaging conditions. Multi-temporal aerial imagery from a large off-grid rural region serves as a study site, with findings validated across three additional datasets. Prompting strategy emerged as the dominant factor governing model behavior. Textual prompting consistently produced the lowest performance and showed the greatest sensitivity to supervision and imaging conditions. In contrast, spatial guidance substantially improved both segmentation accuracy and robustness. Hybrid prompting achieved the highest accuracy and stability, indicating that semantic and spatial guidance provide complementary information. Most performance gains were achieved with only a few hundred annotated samples, demonstrating strong data efficiency. Transfer learning had limited overall impact, with only modest improvements observed for textual prompting under limited supervision. Overall, our findings establish prompting strategy as a key determinant of SAM3 adaptation, robustness, and generalization, highlighting the potential of promptable FMs for scalable PV mapping in data-constrained off-grid regions.