Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing: A Review on Definitions, Methods, Datasets, Advances and Future Trends
Journal
Remote Sensing
Date Issued
2026-02-18
Author(s)
Petrov, Marko
Pandilova, Ema
DOI
10.3390/rs18040637
Abstract
Semantic segmentation in remote sensing images, which is the task of classifying each pixel of the image in a specific category, is widely used in areas such as disaster management, environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, and many others. However, traditional semantic segmentation methods face a major challenge: they require large amounts of annotated data to train effectively. To tackle this challenge, few-shot semantic segmentation has been introduced, where the models can learn and adapt quickly to new classes from just a few annotated samples. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent advances in few-shot semantic segmentation (FSSS) for remote sensing, covering datasets, methods, and emerging research directions. We first outline the fundamental principles of few-shot learning and summarize commonly used remote-sensing benchmarks, emphasizing their scale, geographic diversity, and relevance to episodic evaluation. Next, we categorize FSSS methods into major families (meta-learning, conditioning-based, and foundation-assisted approaches) and analyze how architectural choices, pretraining strategies, and inference protocols influence performance. The discussion highlights empirical trends across datasets, the behavior of different conditioning mechanisms, the impact of self-supervised and multimodal pretraining, and the role of reproducibility and evaluation design. Finally, we identify key challenges and future trends, including benchmark standardization, integration with foundation and multimodal models, efficiency at scale, and uncertainty-aware adaptation. Collectively, they signal a shift toward unified, adaptive models capable of segmenting novel classes across sensors, regions, and temporal domains with minimal supervision.