aiqbench analysis
This research advances zero-shot segmentation by integrating saliency and depth cues into SAM-based models to better isolate communication-tower components in cluttered UAV imagery. By refining foreground priors, the proposed methods significantly reduce false positives and improve instance localization without requiring extensive task-specific training data. The approach demonstrates how geometric constraints can enhance the robustness of foundational vision models for specialized industrial inspection tasks.
Saliency-Depth Conditioning for Zero-Shot Segmentation of Communication-Tower Components in Cluttered UAV Imagery
arXiv:2608.25435v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grained segmentation of communication-tower components in UAV imagery is essential for automated inspection, yet task-specific models are hard to develop due to limited instance-level annotations. Zero-shot segmentation models offer a promising alternative, but in cluttered scenes, visually similar background structures interfere with component localization, causing missed instances and false positives. We propose a model-agnostic saliency-depth foreground-conditioning strategy combining appearance-based saliency with monocular relative depth to construct a coarse tower prior and suppress irrelevant content. We integrate this module with Grounded-SAM and SAM 3, yielding SD-Grounded-SAM and SD-SAM 3. SD-Grounded-SAM further applies geometric and depth-aware box refinement before mask generation, while SD-SAM 3 relies on SAM 3's internal setup. On TOW-300, a dataset of 340 communication-tower UAV images, our strategy improves both baselines: SD-SAM 3 achieves the strongest instance-segmentation performance, while SD-Grounded-SAM produces fewer false positives. Ablations confirm complementary gains from saliency, depth, and box refinement, improving robustness in cluttered scenes.
Abstract:Fine-grained segmentation of communication-tower components in UAV imagery is essential for automated inspection, yet task-specific models are hard to develop due to limited instance-level annotations. Zero-shot segmentation models offer a promising alternative, but in cluttered scenes, visually similar background structures interfere with component localization, causing missed instances and false positives. We propose a model-agnostic saliency-depth foreground-conditioning strategy combining appearance-based saliency with monocular relative depth to construct a coarse tower prior and suppress irrelevant content. We integrate this module with Grounded-SAM and SAM 3, yielding SD-Grounded-SAM and SD-SAM 3. SD-Grounded-SAM further applies geometric and depth-aware box refinement before mask generation, while SD-SAM 3 relies on SAM 3's internal setup. On TOW-300, a dataset of 340 communication-tower UAV images, our strategy improves both baselines: SD-SAM 3 achieves the strongest instance-segmentation performance, while SD-Grounded-SAM produces fewer false positives. Ablations confirm complementary gains from saliency, depth, and box refinement, improving robustness in cluttered scenes.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2608.25435 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2608.25435v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25435 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 252 words
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