Evaluating the Adaptation Potential of SAM2 for Glacier Segmentation in severe Weather

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Ground based time lapse cameras provide continuous, high frequency observations of glacier dynamics; however, automated analysis of these image streams remains challenging due to fog, snowfall, lens contamination, and variable illumination. This study investigates the potential of adapting the foundation segmentation model Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) for glacier segmentation from ground-based monitoring. To enable integration into automated pipelines, SAM2 is configured in image mode with a learned prompt generation strategy, while fine-tuning is restricted to the prompt encoder and mask decoder. In addition, the internal Intersection over Union (IoU) prediction head is utilized as a confidence estimator to assess segmentation reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that the adapted model achieves stable segmentation under moderate environmental variability, while degrading under severe visibility loss. This stability is consistent across model scales and input resolutions. The confidence estimation further provides a meaningful signal for identifying uncertain predictions, supporting reliability-aware processing in downstream workflows.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationXXV ISPRS Congress 2026 “From Imagery to Understanding”, Commission III
Pages205–212
Number of pages8
Volume49
EditionB3-2026
Publication statusPublished - 30 Jul 2026
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesInternational Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
VolumeXLIX-B3-2026
ISSN1682-1750

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-6069-0766/work/222762586
ORCID /0009-0002-0320-2508/work/222763863
Scopus 105047237567

Keywords

Keywords

  • Automation pipeline, Foundation Model, Glacier segmentation, Mask quality estimation, Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2)