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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-673-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>A Critical Synthesis of Uncertainty Quantification and Foundation Models for Semantic Segmentation</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Landgraf</surname>
<given-names>Steven</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Hinz</surname>
<given-names>Joceline</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ulrich</surname>
<given-names>Markus</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (IPF), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>03</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-2-2026</volume>
<fpage>673</fpage>
<lpage>680</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Steven Landgraf et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/673/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-673-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/673/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-673-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/673/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-673-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/673/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-673-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Foundation models are increasingly breaking what seemed to be impossible not long ago by enabling unprecedented accuracy and cross-domain generalization. Yet their lack of interpretability, tendency to be overconfident, and sensitivity to real-world domain shifts pose critical challenges for safety- and mission-critical applications. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) offers a principled way to address these issues, but its integration into segmentation foundation models has yet to be explored. In this paper we present the first systematic evaluation of UQ methods applied to a foundation model for semantic segmentation. We fine-tune a lightweight DPT decoder on top of the pretrained SAM2 encoder to establish a simple yet competitive baseline and benchmark four representative UQ approaches &amp;ndash; Monte Carlo Dropout, Deep Sub-Ensemble, Test-Time Augmentation, and Evidential Deep Learning &amp;ndash; across Cityscapes, NYUv2, and two challenging out-of-domain settings. Our analysis compares segmentation accuracy, calibration, uncertainty quality, and inference time, revealing clear trade-offs between predictive performance, reliability, and computational cost. These results highlight both the promise and the current limitations of uncertainty-aware foundation models, pointing to the need for future work that jointly optimizes accuracy, robustness, and efficiency for real-world deployment.</p>
</abstract>
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