Advances in Earth Science

   

A Semi-Supervised Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation Method Based on Knowledge Distillation

Huang Lingxiao1, 2, 3, Xu Haizhe1, 2*, Yao Xinbo1, 2, 3, Li Zhanwei1, 2   

  1. (1. School of Information Engineering, Ningxia University, Yinchuan 750021, China; 2. Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Information Security for “East Data West Computing” in Ningxia, Yinchuan 750021, China; 3. Collaborative Innovation Center for Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, Ministry of Education and Ningxia, Yinchuan 750021, China)
  • About author:Huang Lingxiao, Research areas include computer vision, remote sensing images and computational hydraulics.E-mail: huanglx@nxu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 12462027) and the Natural Science Foundation of Ningxia (Grant No. 2025AAC030205).

Huang Lingxiao, Xu Haizhe, Yao Xinbo, Li Zhanwei. A Semi-Supervised Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation Method Based on Knowledge Distillation[J]. Advances in Earth Science, DOI: 10.11867/j.issn.1001-8166.2026.071.

Abstract: To address the challenges of high pixel-level annotation costs, ambiguous object boundaries under limited labeling, easy breakage of slender structures, and loss of small targets in high-resolution remote sensing image semantic segmentation, we propose a semi-supervised semantic segmentation method that integrates visual distillation with structural awareness. Based on the FixMatch semi-supervised framework, we design a multi-teacher collaborative visual distillation architecture, leveraging pre-trained DINOv2 and CLIP as frozen teacher models to transfer general visual knowledge from the base models to the student network through feature alignment. We introduce a detail-preserving and semantic compression module that decouples highfrequency details from low-frequency structural features, thereby enhancing boundary perception and detection of small-scale objects. Additionally, we propose a dual-path parameterized context fusion module and an orientationaware strip attention module, which employ learnable channel-grouped parameters during decoding to preserve fine details and strengthen spatial continuity for linear features. Experimental results on the public LoveDA and DeepGlobe datasets demonstrate that with only 10% labeled data, our method achieves an average intersection over union (IoU) of 74.45% and an average F1 score of 84.86% on the DeepGlobe dataset, and an average IoU of 55.71% and an average F1 score of 69.43% on the LoveDA dataset—outperforming current mainstream semisupervised segmentation methods. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each module in improving boundary completeness and reducing structural fragmentation.
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