Two-Stage Remote Sensing Object Instance Segmentation Based on Harmonic Function Theory
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Affiliation:

School of Astronautics, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

Clc Number:

TP751.1

Fund Project:

National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos.62471014, 62125102, U24B20177).

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    Abstract:

    Remote-sensing instance segmentation often suffers from ambiguous object boundaries and cluttered backgrounds, while adding heavy mask heads can increase computational cost and reduce deployment flexibility. This paper aims to develop a fast, accurate, and detector-agnostic mask-generation scheme that can be integrated into existing detection pipelines with minimal engineering overhead and without extra training. We propose a two-stage framework that couples a replaceable object detector (e.g., YOLOv10 or DINO) with a plug-and-play harmonic background modelling (HBM) module. For each detected bounding box, HBM treats the local background as a harmonic function and reconstructs it by least-squares fitting of a truncated harmonic-polynomial basis. Boundary constraints are formed by sampling pixel values along the bounding-box boundary, and the coefficients are solved efficiently via the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse. The foreground mask is then derived from the channel-wise residual between the original image and the reconstructed background, followed by a contrast-enhancing nonlinearity, Otsu thresholding, and connected-component filtering to suppress spurious fragments. The overall pipeline is fully decoupled from the detector: the detector is not modified or retrained, and the additional computation mainly comes from solving a small least-squares problem per proposal rather than processing full-resolution feature maps with a learned segmentation head. Extensive experiments on NWPU VHR-10 and iSAID-mini datasets demonstrate consistent gains in both box and mask metrics, while maintaining high throughput. With DINO as the proposal generator, DINO+HBM achieves AP-Box and AP-Mask of 69.3% and 66.3% on NWPU VHR-10 and reaches AP-Mask-50 of 92.1%, improving the previous best result by 2.5 percentage points. On iSAID-mini, DINO+HBM obtains AP-Box and AP-Mask of 55.3% and 42.3% with AP-Mask-50 and AP-Mask-75 of 72.1% and 53.3%, showing clear benefits under more complex scenes. Ablation studies further verify the roles of truncation order, constraint-point number, and sampling strategy, and indicate that bounding-box boundary sampling is more stable than random sampling for background regression and mask extraction without sacrificing speed. The proposed training-free harmonic background suppression provides an efficient way to obtain boundary-faithful instance masks in remote-sensing images and offers a practical, modular add-on to detector-based pipelines when rapid inference and easy deployment are required.

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LI Zekun, SHI Zhenwei, ZOU Zhengxia. Two-Stage Remote Sensing Object Instance Segmentation Based on Harmonic Function Theory[J]. Journal of Data Acquisition and Processing,2026,(1):147-159.

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History
  • Received:February 24,2025
  • Revised:October 15,2025
  • Adopted:
  • Online: March 01,2026
  • Published:
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