arXiv Computer Vision

MEOX: Compact Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts for Earth Observation

MEOX is a compact multimodal masked autoencoder designed for Earth Observation that uses a 2.939 million‑parameter encoder and 3.115 million total parameters. It incorporates sensor‑specific adapters, explicit validity signals, and a shared sparse‑expert block to maintain modality‑dependent processing before a learned patch‑wise fusion, followed by fourteen encoder blocks that process a single spatial sequence with four metadata tokens. Pretrained on 1.228 million MMEarth64 samples, MEOX achieves strong performance on GEO‑Bench tasks, surpassing prior CSMoE results, and demonstrates effective sensor‑flexible representation learning with a modest parameter budget.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 26

LoCA: Enabling Multi-Modality in Geospatial Location Encoders

arXiv:2610.32894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Location encoders map geographic coordinates to high-dimensional descriptors through contrastive alignment with paired Earth Observation imagery. We pr...

By Panagiotis Koromilas, Eleanna Vali, Diogenis Antonopoulos, Eleni Saka, Dimitris Christofis, Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos, Konstantin Klemmer, Ioannis Papoutsis, Yannis Panagakis, Mihalis A. Nicolaou
arXiv AI
Aug 10

SLED: Scalable Location Encoding via Distillation

arXiv:2608. 06612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The plethora of readily available geospatial data offers exciting opportunities to learn high quality representations of the planet, but the sheer size of the Earth Observations (EO), differing modalities, and different sensor types pose significant challenges in doing so.

By Kevin Lane, Zhongying Wang, Esther Rolf, Morteza Karimzadeh
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Multimodal-Multiresolution Foundation Model for Lunar Remote Sensing

The paper introduces a multimodal foundation model for lunar remote sensing, trained from scratch on SomBench—a dataset of nearly two million co‑registered tile bundles across 11 modalities at 1 m and 100 m resolutions. The model extends the TerraMind masked‑token architecture with lunar‑specific features such as explicit acquisition geometry and joint training of two spatial scales, and employs FlexiViT patch embeddings for adaptable patch sizes. Evaluation on crater detection, irregular mare patch segmentation, and polar ice prospectivity regression shows that the pretrained model matches or surpasses ImageNet‑pretrained baselines, with notable label efficiency and effective adaptation via LoRA.

By Paolo Fraccaro, Gabby Nyirjesy, Daniela Szwarcman, Himanshu Patil, Vishal Gaur, Rohit Lal, Rachel A. Slank, Geoffrey Dawson, Hiyam Debary, Michael K. Barker, Andrew Annex, Vishnu Viswanathan, Zachary Morse, Ethan I. Schaefer, Nikolaos Dionelis, Ankur Kumar, Campbell D. Watson, Manil Maskey, Rebekah I. Dawson-Rigas, Juan Bernab\'e-Moreno, Rahul Ramachandran, Sujit Roy
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

VLM2GeoVec: Toward Universal Multimodal Embeddings for Remote Sensing

The paper introduces RSMEB, a unified benchmark for remote‑sensing multimodal retrieval that evaluates both cross‑modal and interleaved retrieval across 21 tasks under a single ranking protocol. It also presents VLM2GeoVec, an instruction‑conditioned single‑encoder model that embeds image, text, bounding‑box, and geo‑coordinate tokens into one sequence and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on region‑caption, referring‑expression, and semantic geo‑aware retrieval while remaining competitive on conventional tasks. The authors provide code, checkpoints, and data on GitHub to facilitate reproducibility.

By Emanuel S\'anchez Aimar, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Yonghao Xu, Michael Felsberg
arXiv AI
3d ago

FLORO: A Multimodal Geospatial Foundation Model for Ecological Remote Sensing Across Sensors and Scales

FLORO is a multimodal geospatial foundation model that learns transferable representations from a small but diverse remote sensing corpus, including Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, SkySAT imagery, elevation, and UAV data. It uses masked autoencoding and availability‑aware inputs to handle varying sensor configurations, enabling a unified input space across heterogeneous modalities. Evaluated on the PANGAEA benchmark, FLORO achieved strong, stable transfer performance across scene classification, segmentation, and regression tasks, ranking second in segmentation and third in scene classification while excelling in regression tasks.

By Jorge L. Rodriguez, Victor Angulo Morales, Areej Alwahas, Mariana Elias Lara, Fida Mohammad Thoker, Kasper Johansen, Bernard Ghanem, Fernando T. Maestre, Matthew F. McCabe
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 16

Data-Efficient ConvNeXt Pretraining for High-Resolution Sentinel-1 GRD SAR Representation Learning

The paper introduces SparK-SAR, a sparse convolutional masked pretraining framework that leverages ConvNeXt for high‑resolution Sentinel‑1 GRD SAR data. It presents three key contributions: a domain‑adapted ConvNeXt‑RS encoder with a reduced stem stride, a lightweight ConvNeXt‑512 decoder that cuts VRAM usage while matching UNet accuracy, and an analysis of FP16 instability and layer‑wise learning‑rate decay benefits. Experiments on four Copernicus‑Bench S1GRD tasks show that the 27.8 M‑parameter ConvNeXt‑RS encoder outperforms a larger ViT baseline on most tasks and demonstrates strong data efficiency, with classification saturating at 10–25 % of the SSL4EO‑S12 corpus.

By Yuki Natsume, Sang-Ho Yun, Chai Kiat Yeo
arXiv AI
Jun 19

TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation

arXiv:2504. 11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO).

By Johannes Jakubik, Felix Yang, Benedikt Blumenstiel, Erik Scheurer, Rocco Sedona, Stefano Maurogiovanni, Jente Bosmans, Nikolaos Dionelis, Valerio Marsocci, Niklas Kopp, Rahul Ramachandran, Paolo Fraccaro, Thomas Brunschwiler, Gabriele Cavallaro, Juan Bernabe-Moreno, Nicolas Long\'ep\'e