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<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-2-2026-681-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>The Impact of CutMix on Reliability and Robustness in 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>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>681</fpage>
<lpage>687</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Steven Landgraf</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-2-2026/681/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-681-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/681/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-681-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/681/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-681-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/681/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-681-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Ensuring not only high accuracy but also reliable and robust predictions is critical for the deployment of semantic segmentation models in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Despite the widespread use of CutMix &amp;ndash; a simple yet powerful data augmentation strategy &amp;ndash; its effect on the reliability and robustness in dense predictions tasks remains unexplored. Motivated by recent findings that semi-supervised segmentation methods, where CutMix is a core component, can severely degrade reliability, this study isolates and systematically analyzes the influence of CutMix on segmentation accuracy, calibration, and uncertainty quality. We evaluate two representative architectures, the CNN-based DeepLabV3+ and the transformer-based SegFormer, across both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. Our results show that CutMix has only a minor impact on segmentation accuracy but consistently improves the reliability, particularly under distribution shifts. These improvements indicate that CutMix primarily enhances the trustworthiness of the model&amp;rsquo;s calibration and uncertainty rather than the raw segmentation prediction itself. This distinction is crucial for safety-critical deployment, where reliable confidence estimates are as important as raw performance.</p>
</abstract>
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