Zero-Parameter Geometric Gating for Temporally Stable Low-Altitude UAV Video Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

Video semantic segmentation for low-altitude UAVs requires temporal consistency, yet dense optical flow introduces spatially structured noise in the planar regions that dominate aerial imagery. We propose a zero-parameter geometric gate that uses RANSAC homography inlier ratios on a $16\times16$ spatial grid to route each region to either homography or optical flow warp before fusion via Semantic Similarity Propagation. The gate requires no learned parameters -- only a median-threshold binary decision on RANSAC statistics -- adding only 211K trainable parameters (the SSP fusion layer) to a frozen backbone. On synthetic UAVid, the method achieves +4.24--4.91\% mIoU improvement over base models across two architectures (SegFormer-b2 and Hiera-S+UPerNet). Mechanism diagnostics reveal that flow residuals in planar regions are spatially autocorrelated (Moran&#39;s I = 0.32, $p < 0.001$), predict boundary instability (Spearman $ρ= 0.66$), and that rigidification recovers temporal consistency from 62\% to 92\% (+29.5pp) in homography-valid regions.