arXiv Computer Vision

Ground-to-Satellite Knowledge Distillation for Crop Classification under Temporal and Geographic Shift

Ground-to-satellite knowledge distillation leverages ground-level field photographs to provide privileged supervision for crop classification models built on pretrained satellite embeddings. Using a frozen CLIP-based photo teacher, classifiers trained on AlphaEarth and TESSERA representations achieve consistent improvements over satellite-only baselines, especially under temporal and geographic shifts. The method enhances robustness without altering inference requirements, as photographs are used only during training.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AgroBench: A Reproducible Multimodal Benchmark for Weakly Supervised Crop Yield Learning from County Statistics and Pixel Observations

AgroBench is a reproducible benchmark that converts U.S. county-level crop yield statistics into weakly supervised pixel‑level crop time series. The data generation pipeline fuses USDA yield data with land cover masks, Sentinel‑2 and Sentinel‑1 imagery, climatic variables, and terrain information to produce multimodal sequences for individual crop pixels across the growing season. The benchmark includes over 13 million observations from 788,654 crop pixels, covering 5,107 county‑year combinations for five major U.S. crops from 2017 to 2024, and establishes a Leave‑One‑Year‑Out evaluation protocol with baseline machine learning results.

By Udaiveer Singh, Rajiv Ranjan, Shashank Tamaskar, Dharmendra Saraswat
arXiv AI
Sep 1

A Composition-Aware Pretraining Framework for Geospatial Foundation Models

The paper introduces a composition‑aware pretraining framework for geospatial foundation models that explicitly encodes fractional land‑cover mixtures as histogram targets for each satellite image cell. By using Earth Mover’s Distance to distill these composition targets into a 36.8 M‑parameter backbone, the authors demonstrate significant improvements on region‑level tasks such as zero‑shot image retrieval and scene classification, while maintaining competitive performance on fine‑grained tasks like segmentation and object detection. The method outperforms larger models (SatMAE and Prithvi‑EO‑2.0) and achieves a 55.6 % relative boost on the ForestNet‑12 dataset, evidencing the benefit of explicit composition modeling.

By Aryan Kashyap Naveen, Abhishek Srinivas, Pranav Moothedath, Shrutilipi Bhattacharjee
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 Computer Vision
Sep 18

AgriScope: Pixel-Grounded Multimodal Understanding for Agricultural Images

AgriScope is a unified pixel‑grounded multimodal framework designed for agricultural image understanding. It supports image‑level, region‑level, and pixel‑level tasks such as grounded caption generation, referring expression segmentation, and multi‑turn multimodal interaction. The authors also introduce AgriGround, a large‑scale dataset with over 500K images and 11M instruction‑following samples, created via an automatic annotation pipeline that combines caption generation, phrase‑level grounding, segmentation mask creation, and instruction synthesis.

By Abderrahmene Boudiaf, Mohamad Alanssari, Irfan Hussain, Sajid Javed
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

AgriScope: Pixel-Grounded Multimodal Understanding for Agricultural Images

AgriScope is a unified pixel‑grounded multimodal framework designed for agricultural image understanding, supporting image‑level, region‑level, and pixel‑level tasks such as grounded caption generation, referring expression segmentation, and multi‑turn multimodal interaction. It incorporates biologically specialized semantic representations with dense spatial grounding through biological‑semantic encoding, dense spatial representations, and pixel decoding. The authors also introduce AgriGround, a large‑scale dataset of over 500K images and 11M instruction‑following samples, created via an automatic annotation pipeline that combines caption generation, phrase‑level grounding, segmentation mask generation, and task‑oriented instruction synthesis to provide densely grounded supervision for agricultural vision‑language learning.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Detection of Christmas tree plantations from high-resolution aerial imagery. A case study in the French Morvan

The study presents a new approach to detect Christmas tree plantations in high‑resolution aerial imagery, treating the task as a rare‑target semantic segmentation problem. It introduces a Hard Negative Mining strategy that significantly improves precision‑recall performance, achieving an IoU of 0.733 and an F1‑score of 0.846 on a 2020 test set. Temporal transfer experiments demonstrate the model’s ability to generalize across years, while large‑scale validation highlights the challenge posed by the plantations’ small spatial footprint.

By Francesca Razzano, Emanuele Dalsasso, Adrien Baysse-Lain\'e, Silvia Liberata Ullo, Gilda Schirinzi, Jocelyn Chanussot
arXiv AI
Aug 3

Leveraging Image Generators to Address Data Scarcity: The Gen4Regen Dataset for Forest Regeneration Mapping

arXiv:2605. 05627v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sustainable forest management relies on precise species composition mapping, yet traditional ground surveys are labour-intensive and geographically constrained.

By Gabriel Jeanson, David-Alexandre Duclos, William Larriv\'ee-Hardy, No\'e Cochet, Mat\v{e}j Boxan, Anthony Desch\^enes, Fran\c{c}ois Pomerleau, Philippe Gigu\`ere