AAMBERS-UAV: Acquisition-Aware Multimodal Backbone Evaluation and Ranking for UAV Weedy Rice Segmentation

Abstract

UAV image collections contain spatially and temporally related frames, yet semantic-segmentation benchmarks commonly split them at image level. Such splitting can place samples from one acquisition in both model development and testing, obscuring transfer to a genuinely new survey. Using the 734-sample WeedyRice-RGBMS-DB, we fix a 124-image target-acquisition test set and compare two protocols with identical train, validation, and test counts: target-held-out, which excludes the target acquisition from development, and target-exposed, which admits its remaining images. SegFormer-B0 is evaluated with RGB, four-band multispectral (MS), and seven-channel RGB+MS input over two fixed-split seeds. RGB is strongest under complete acquisition holdout ($0.7317\pm0.0201$ IoU), whereas RGB+MS becomes strongest after target exposure ($0.7822\pm0.0269$). A fixed-split U-Net/ResNet18 replication confirms positive exposure gains for all three inputs, but retains RGB as the best modality under both protocols. Acquisition exposure therefore increases measured performance across both evaluated backbones, while its effect on modality ranking is architecture-dependent. A supplied-split audit reveals strong near-sequential dependence, and corruption tests show that early fusion is substantially more sensitive to RGB--MS displacement than to moderate radiometric scaling. These results support acquisition-aware same-test evaluation as a necessary complement to ordinary image-level splitting in multimodal UAV benchmarks. The code and supporting the findings of this study will be publicly released upon acceptance of the paper.