MAgSeg: Segmentation of Agricultural Landscapes in High-Resolution Satellite Imagery using Multimodal Large Language Models
MAgSeg: Segmentation of Agricultural Landscapes in High-Resolution Satellite Imagery using Multimodal Large Language Models
Piyush Tiwary, Utkarsh Ahuja, Depanshu Sani, Aishwarya Jayagopal, Sagar Gubbi, Subhashini Venugopalan, Alok Talekar, Vaibhav Rajan
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI4Tech: AI Enabling Technologies. Pages 6546-6554.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/728
Agricultural landscape segmentation in the Global South is challenging as it is characterized by fragmented plots, high intra-class variance, and a scarcity of labeled training data. Recent advances in segmentation have been made by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, current approaches encounter critical context length bottlenecks and a domain alignment gap in understanding satellite features. We address these limitations through MAgSeg, a novel, decoder-free MLLM segmentation approach. MAgSeg is an architecturally efficient approach that enables standard MLLMs to perform segmentation of complex smallholder agricultural landscapes from high-resolution satellite imagery, without requiring auxiliary vision decoders. We introduce a novel instruction tuning data format designed to enable scalable fine-tuning and post-training on high resolution satellite imagery, which enables MAgSeg to learn from the global context of the image while generating text tokens for only a patch within the image. Extensive evaluations on datasets spanning three countries in the Global South demonstrate that MAgSeg significantly outperforms state-of-the-art MLLM baselines, offering a scalable solution to map smallholder agricultural environments.
Keywords:
Domain-specific AI4Tech: AI4Agriculture
