Methane-Plume Segmentation From Hyperspectral Satellite Imagery Via Multimodal Deep Learning

Abstract: Efficient detection of methane plumes is crucial for understanding and mitigating global warming, as accurately identifying and segmenting them in earth observation imagery remain essential for large-scale monitoring. In this work, we propose a multimodal deep learning model that integrates a feature-guided methane enhancement (FGME) mechanism which injects physically meaningful methane cues into transformer-based RGB representations at multiple semantic scales. Our method is evaluated on the MPDataset, where it outperforms the state-of-the-art with improvements of +0.92 in MIoU, +0.87 in MPrecision and +1.01 in Recall. Notably, these gains are obtained with a substantially lower computational cost than other high-performing architectures, resulting in a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off for large-scale methane monitoring. These results highlight the potential of efficient multimodal fusion strategies for accurate and scalable methane plume segmentation in real-world remote sensing applications.