Excite, Attend and Segment (EASe): Domain-Agnostic Fine-Grained Mask Discovery with Feature Calibration and Self-Supervised Upsampling

Unsupervised segmentation approaches have increasingly leveraged foundation models (FM) to improve salient object discovery. However, these methods often falter in scenes with complex, multi-component morphologies, where fine-grained structural detail is indispensable. Many state-of-the-art unsupervised segmentation pipelines rely on mask discovery approaches that utilize coarse, patch-level representations. These coarse representations inherently suppress the fine-grained detail required to resolve such complex morphologies. To overcome this limitation, we propose Excite, Attend and Segment (EASe), an unsupervised domain-agnostic semantic segmentation framework for easy fine-grained mask discovery across challenging real-world scenes. EASe utilizes novel Semantic-Aware Upsampling with Channel Excitation (SAUCE) to excite low-resolution FM feature channels for selective calibration and attends across spatially-encoded image and FM features to recover full-resolution semantic representations. Finally, EASe segments the aggregated features into multi-granularity masks using a novel training-free Cue-Attentive Feature Aggregator (CAFE) which leverages SAUCE attention scores as a semantic grouping signal. EASe, together with SAUCE and CAFE, operate directly at pixel-level feature representations to enable accurate fine-grained dense semantic mask discovery. Our evaluation demonstrates superior performance of EASe over previous state-of-the-arts (SOTAs) across major standard benchmarks and diverse datasets with complex morphologies. Code is available at https://ease-project.github.io

Multiclass Post-Earthquake Building Assessment Integrating Optical and SAR Satellite Imagery, Ground Motion, and Soil Data with Transformers

Timely and accurate assessments of building damage are crucial for effective response and recovery in the aftermath of earthquakes. Conventional preliminary damage assessments (PDA) often rely on manual door-to-door inspections, which are not only time-consuming but also pose significant safety risks. To safely expedite the PDA process, researchers have studied the applicability of satellite imagery processed with heuristic and machine learning approaches. These approaches output binary or, more recently, multiclass damage states at the scale of a block or a single building. However, the current performance of such approaches limits practical applicability. To address this limitation, we introduce a metadata-enriched, transformer based framework that combines high-resolution post-earthquake satellite imagery with building-specific metadata relevant to the seismic performance of the structure. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiclass post-earthquake damage identification for buildings from the Turkey-Syria earthquake on February 6, 2023. Specifically, we demonstrate that incorporating metadata, such as seismic intensity indicators, soil properties, and SAR damage proxy maps not only enhances the model's accuracy and ability to distinguish between damage classes, but also improves its generalizability across various regions. Furthermore, we conducted a detailed, class-wise analysis of feature importance to understand the model's decision-making across different levels of building damage. This analysis reveals how individual metadata features uniquely contribute to predictions for each damage class. By leveraging both satellite imagery and metadata, our proposed framework enables faster and more accurate damage assessments for precise, multiclass, building-level evaluations that can improve disaster response and accelerate recovery efforts for affected communities.