Although significant advances have been made in the semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images, obtaining accurate pixel-wise annotations remains resource-intensive. We propose SparseFormer, a credible dual-CNN expert-guided Transformer model designed for semantic segmentation using point-level annotations to reduce this annotation burden. SparseFormer comprises three branches, where two CNN branches employ different attention mechanisms to encourage diverse outputs. To enhance the local consistency of pseudo-labels, we introduce a pixel-adaptive refinement module that dynamically refines CNN output probabilities by incorporating image information during training. A credible assessment is then performed to combine the CNN outputs, producing highquality pseudo-labels that supervise the CNN-Transformer hybrid branch. This hybrid branch integrates global representations with local features, achieving precise segmentation. To further strengthen the CNN branches, we introduce a knowledge distillation strategy that steadily feeds back information from the hybrid branch to CNN branches, mitigating overfitting risks caused by sparse supervision. SparseFormer employs credible assessment to reduce pseudo-label uncertainty, followed by continuous interaction and dynamic information enhancement among the three branches in an end-to-end training process. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that SparseFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yujia73/SparseFormer.
22 March 2025 in ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing