GeoSAM-Lite: A Lightweight Foundation Model for Onboard Remote Sensing Segmentation

arXiv:2607.03760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of large-scale foundation models like Segment Anything Model (SAM) on resource-constrained Earth observation platforms is hindered by prohibitive computational costs and the domain shift between natural and remote sensing imagery. To address these challenges, we propose extit{Geo}spatial extit{S}egment extit{A}nything extit{M}odel-Lite (GeoSAM-Lite), a lightweight, prompt-free segmentation framework designed for efficient onboard remote sensing segmentation. GeoSAM-Lite incorporates two core innovations: (1) Geospatial-Domain Initialization (Geo-Init), a domain-aware pre-training strategy that distills geospatial priors from a specialized teacher to bridge the domain gap; and (2) Feature Fusion Layers (FFL), which recalibrate spatial features and restore high-frequency boundary cues to overcome the capacity bottlenecks of lightweight backbones. Experiments across representative datasets, with a primary focus on cloud scenarios to evaluate performance under extreme scale variations and complex boundaries, demonstrate that GeoSAM-Lite achieves competitive accuracy while reducing parameters by 92.8% compared to the heavyweight RSAM-Seg. By establishing a superior Pareto frontier between efficiency and fidelity, GeoSAM-Lite offers a practical solution for real-time segmentation on edge devices.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-07-07