Remote Sensing Image Understanding

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14 papers in the last four weeks, up 56% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 147

Oct 8, 2026cs.AI

Onboard Marine Anomaly Detection on $Φ$ sat-2: From Simulation-Based Development to In-Orbit Demonstration

Onboard Artificial Intelligence can improve responsiveness and bandwidth efficiency of Earth Observation systems by processing data directly on the satellite. This paper presents the experience gained from the development, onboard integration, and post-launch adaptation of a lightweight marine anomaly detection pipeline deployed on the European Space Agency's

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sat-2 mission. The application combines sea segmentation, self-supervised feature encoding of marine regions, generic anomaly detection based on deviations from a normal sea state, and optional characterization of selected anomaly types. Before launch, the pipeline was trained and validated on simulated

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sat-2 imagery to assess algorithmic performance and compatibility with resource-constrained onboard hardware. After integration and functional validation in the mission environment, early experiments on real

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sat-2 acquisitions revealed a significant mismatch between simulated and in-orbit data. The pipeline was therefore retrained on real Level-1 imagery using an improved annotation strategy to better handle ambiguous marine regions, substantially enhancing performance. Beyond demonstrating the onboard feasibility of the application, the

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sat-2 experience highlights the importance of robust annotation strategies and sensor-aware design, and shows that simulation-based development is valuable for pre-flight risk reduction, while reliable scientific validation requires representative in-orbit data and should be clearly distinguished from functional validation.

Clotilde Szywala, Thomas Goudemant, Marjorie Bellizzi +2

Institut de Recherche Technologique Saint Exupéry 240 Rue Evariste Galois 06410 Biot, France

Anomaly Detection Remote Sensing Image Understanding Sim-to-Real Transfer

Oct 7, 2026cs.CV

SAREO-FM: Decoupled Semantic Supervision for SAR-EO Foundation Models

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and electro-optical (EO) imagery provide complementary observations: SAR enables day-and-night, weather-resilient sensing, whereas EO provides rich appearance and fine-grained semantic cues. We introduce SAREO-FM, which avoids forcing a single token stream to serve two distinct roles: modality tokens preserve how each sensor observes the scene through masked reconstruction, while learnable semantic queries capture what the scene contains under guidance from a pretrained vision foundation model (VFM). By jointly encoding these queries with SAR and EO tokens, the queries acquire modality-grounded semantic context, while the modality-token outputs remain the explicit targets of masked reconstruction. This design assigns semantic and reconstruction supervision to separate token streams while preserving their interaction within the shared encoder. Pretrained on the million-scale SAR-1M corpus, SAREO-FM achieves strong unimodal transfer for both SAR-only and EO-only inputs, while delivering substantial gains from joint SAR--EO observations on tasks that benefit from complementary sensing.

Jeonghyeok Do, Munchurl Kim

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Multimodal Pretraining Multimodal Foundation Models Cross-Modal Representation Learning Masked Image Modeling

Oct 6, 2026cs.CV

RSJEV: Discriminative Remote Sensing Scene Classification with Multimodal Large Language Models

Remote sensing scene classification is a fundamental task in Earth observation and geospatial analysis. Existing approaches mainly follow three paradigms: task-specific visual classification, vision-language similarity matching, and autoregressive multimodal generation. However, visual classifiers rely on predefined label spaces, CLIP-based methods perform recognition through static image-text alignment, and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduce unnecessary token-level generation for classification tasks with explicit candidate categories. To address these limitations, we propose RSJEV, a one-pass multimodal decision framework for remote sensing scene classification. Unlike conventional MLLMs that formulate classification as autoregressive text generation, RSJEV reformulates scene classification as a candidate-conditioned multimodal discriminative decision process, where visual representations, task instructions, and candidate category semantics are jointly modeled. Specifically, we introduce a OnePass Decider that extracts multimodal decision states and directly estimates category probabilities within the candidate category space, eliminating autoregressive decoding while preserving vision-language interactions. Extensive experiments on three widely used remote sensing scene classification benchmarks, including UC Merced, AID, and NWPU-RESISC45, demonstrate that RSJEV achieves superior classification performance compared with representative CNN-, Transformer-, Mamba-, CLIP-, and MLLM-based methods. Moreover, RSJEV significantly reduces inference costs and achieves a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off with only a compact 0.8B-parameter model. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of state-conditioned multimodal decision making for efficient remote sensing image understanding. The code will be available at https://github.com/Dongtcs/RSJEV.

Dongchen Si, Di Wang, Mingzhen Xu +3

School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China · State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Efficient Multimodal Inference Multimodal Large Language Models Multimodal Classification

Oct 6, 2026cs.CV

CETUS: How Far Do Representations Trained on Earth Transfer to Cassini SAR of Titan?

Cassini synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images reveal the dunes, plains, and lake basins of Titan, providing an instance of representations learned from Earth imagery for planetary terrain classification. Cross-domain Evaluation of Earth-to-Titan Transfer Using SAR (CETUS) compares features from DINOv2, DOFA and CROMA with classical image measurements and features from an untrained vision transformer on the U.S. Geological Survey's Cassini SAR mosaic. The classifiers learn terrain labels from an expert geomorphological map and predict those labels in geographically separate Titan regions. Under logistic regression settings, pretrained encoders achieve higher mean macro F1 than the combined classical features. Encoder rankings change when feature scaling, optimization, and regularization change together. Further training on Titan improves DINOv2 performance, degrades DOFA performance, and leads to mixed results for CROMA under the tested settings. Architectural and input processing differences prevent these comparisons from isolating the effect of pretraining. Classifier fitting and performance on individual terrain classes matter when assessing representation transfer for planetary mapping. Since the map draws partly on the same radar observations, the scores measure agreement with expert interpretation.

Kevin Lee

University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA · NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Geospatial Representation Learning Remote Sensing Cross-Domain Transfer Learning

Oct 1, 2026cs.CV

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Enhanced Radiometer Image Precipitation Estimation using Conditional Flow Matching

Deep generative networks have recently achieved unprecedented performance in precise image and video editing using sophisticated textual prompts. However, the effectiveness of such models heavily depends on access to very large supervised and annotated image datasets, which can be very difficult to obtain. This is particularly true for satellite instruments, which very rarely overlap with labelled data, and suffer from domain shifts in the rare occasions they do. In this paper, we investigate the potential of flow matching models for unsupervised domain adaptation of satellite radiometer images. Our main contribution is a novel unsupervised method that achieves precise domain alignment by leveraging parts of the deterministic ordinary differential equations in flow matching models, conditioned on different satellite instruments. A key strength of our approach is its ability to preserve essential information while adapting across any domains since the perturbations are in theory bijective. Extensive experiments conducted on the GPM-Core constellation show the benefit of our conditional domain adaptation, particularly in improving rain precipitation estimation from radiometer imagery.

Victor Enescu, Assaad Zeghina, Matthieu Meignin +2

LATMOS/IPSL, UVSQ Universit´e Paris-Saclay, Sorbonne Universit´e, CNRS Guyancourt, France · ARCHES Team, Inria Paris, France

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Conditional Flow Matching Remote Sensing

Sep 30, 2026cs.CV

FedMAD: Modulation-Aware Directional Aggregation for Federated Learning in Remote Sensing Image Classification

Federated learning (FL) has recently attracted increasing attention in remote sensing (RS) since it enables collaborative model training across decentralized RS image archives without requiring direct access to local data. However, FL performance significantly degrades when the data distributions between clients are heterogeneous, which often occurs due to geographical differences, seasonal changes, and varying image acquisition and atmospheric conditions. To address this challenge, in this letter, we propose a novel personalized FL framework (denoted as FedMAD) for RS image classification problems. The proposed framework separates globally shared representation parameters from client-specific adaptation parameters to preserve client-specific features while maintaining globally transferable representations. This is achieved by integrating lightweight modulation modules and local batch normalization layers into the backbone network. Although globally shared parameters are collaboratively optimized between clients, client-specific parameters remain local to preserve domain-specific feature characteristics. In addition, FedMAD introduces a modulation-aware directional aggregation strategy that dynamically adjusts the importance of aggregation for each client according to the alignment of local modulation updates. This allows the global optimization process to suppress conflicting client updates originating from heterogeneous data distributions while enhancing the contribution of clients with consistent adaptation behaviors. The experimental results obtained on the BigEarthNet-S2 and EuroSAT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FedMAD compared to state-of-the-art FL algorithms under heterogeneous RS data distributions. The code of the proposed framework will be publicly available at https://git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/fedmad.

Barış Büyüktaş, Begüm Demir

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin, 10587 Berlin, Germany · BIFOLD - Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, 10587 Berlin, Germany

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Federated Learning Aggregation Non-IID Federated Learning Federated Learning Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Sep 29, 2026cs.CV

Aperture: Training-Free Multiscale Concept Bottlenecks for Remote Sensing

While earth observation models have advanced substantially, they still lack interpretability. While concept-bottleneck models provide interpretability and expert interaction, they are either too expensive to train for the remote sensing domain or perform poorly without annotation. We posit that in expert domains like remote sensing, such training-free models require both fine details in both image and concept space. In image space, we propose a multiscale concept bottleneck using greedy quadtree routing to locate small concepts. In concept space, we replace contrastive vision language models with pre-trained MLLMs and present a way to get reliable concept scores from them. We introduce APERTURE that blends concept scores at the global image and native concept-scale level to give state-ofthe-art training-free model performance. To test these models, introduce SiFC, a fine-grained concept-centric dataset across three countries, with human-reviewed class-level concept maps. On SiFC, APERTURE outperforms the best training-free baselines by more than 10 percentage points in macro F1-score, and notably also outperforms supervised concept bottleneck models. Targeted component-removal tests examine whether concept scores respond to changes in visual evidence, while temporal experiments show that descriptor updates improve recognition of technological changes without retraining.

Rishabh Mondal, Nipun Batra, Utkarsh Mall

Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, UAE

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Concept Bottleneck Models Remote Sensing

Sep 29, 2026cs.CV

RS-OPSD: Reliable Privileged On-Policy-Self-Distillation for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing VQA

Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing visual question answering (VQA) requires models to resolve small visual evidence within extremely large images. Existing approaches typically rely on token pruning, visual search, or tool-augmented reasoning at inference time. We instead investigate whether the benefit of zoom-in visual privilege can be internalized into the model. We introduce RS-OPSD, a reliable privileged on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) framework for UHR remote sensing VQA. To provide high-quality privileged information with explicit question-relevant evidence, we construct GeoEvidence-6K, containing 6,750 VQA samples across seven task categories with evidence-region annotations, and develop Human Feedback-Guided Skill Refinement (HF-SR) for scalable annotation. To address context loss from tight crops and conflicting signals from imperfect teachers, RS-OPSD introduces Context-Preserving Visual Privilege (CPVP) and Correctness-Aligned Distillation (CAD). Without any additional visual search or tool calls at inference time, RS-OPSD achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on XLRS-Bench, MME-RealWorld-RS, and LRS-VQA, outperforming previous SOTA models of comparable scale by an average of 4.0 percentage points. Moreover, our 2B variant, RS-OPD-Lite, surpasses most 8B-scale models while achieving the fastest measured inference speed. Our Code, GeoEvidence-6K, and the model weights for RS-OPSD and RS-OPD-Lite are publicly available.

Chengjie Jiang, Yunqi Zhou, Jiafeng Yan +3

Tsinghua University · Zhejiang University · Central University of Finance and Economics +2

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Visual Question Answering Remote Sensing VQA On-Policy Self-Distillation VLM Distillation

Sep 29, 2026cs.CV

Pixel-Level Transformers in Remote Sensing: A Canopy Height Case Study

Predicting canopy height from medium-resolution satellite imagery is a common and scalable approach for assessing the condition of the world's forests, which play a crucial role in climate change mitigation. While Transformer-based architectures have shown strong performance in many domains, their straightforward application to dense (i.e., pixel-level) regression tasks often yields suboptimal results. In particular, the patch size has a crucial impact on the model performance. In this work, we consider pixel-level attention schemes and show that the resulting models generally outperform those relying on larger patch sizes. However, pixel-level attention can be a prohibitively resource-intensive operation. For this reason, we conduct an extensive experimental study using efficient attention variants to identify favorable trade-offs between prediction quality and resource requirements, facilitating the practical deployment of the proposed models. In addition, we perform a comprehensive comparison with several well-established models in the field and show that, with suitable hyperparameter choices, Transformer-based architectures can outperform competing approaches. Our findings provide practical guidance for designing models for pixel-level regression tasks on medium-resolution satellite imagery, including canopy height and biomass estimation, soil moisture mapping, and yield forecasting.

Sven Ligensa, Jan Pauls, Karsten Schrödter +2

University of Münster Münster, Germany · Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement Paris, France

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing Transformer Attention Efficient ViTs Attention Mechanisms

Sep 25, 2026cs.CV

WeaveAgent: A Two-Stage Tool-Routing Agent for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Problem. Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing with vague user intents has two bottlenecks: visual tokens are expensive, and tool calling must be format-reliable (pretrained models emit zero tool calls zero-shot). Method. WeaveAgent, a two-stage tool-routing agent, decouples routing from visual perception. Stage A is routing-first: emission is trained, not elicited. Stage B executes conditionally: intrinsic queries enter visual answering (full-scene thumbnail; a WeaveEarth-style evidence board as an optional fixed-budget, approx. 5k-token compression interface); extrinsic queries execute tool call on original full-resolution imagery, answering from tool observations in a second, observation-masked round. Training: alignment SFT, then GRPO under reward R_WA2. Results. Alignment SFT lifts extrinsic routing from 0% to 80.75% (323/400); GRPO suppresses 9 intrinsic mis-emissions while tool selection is unchanged. The trained 2B system does not beat the zero-shot 8B baseline overall (0.263 vs. 0.250), a diagnostic contribution. Oracle attribution separates two repair ingredients: loading the observation into context lifts extrinsic answer accuracy from 0.025 to 0.425 under marker-free cross-mode returns, and the two-turn SFT stage adds a further +9.3 points to 0.518 at a small routing cost. A +/- image ablation shows emission suppression is visually grounded, and a query-register matrix shows LLM-rewritten queries cost trained checkpoints 2-11 points. Scope. All training and evaluation use the 5,000 / 3,273 / 1,000-record VagueUHR corpus (600 intrinsic + 400 tool-requiring; the base seeds synthesis and is not used for optimization). Single-pass evidence construction runs at 7.31 s per image on an RTX 4090. Code, data, and evaluation protocols will be released.

Zhongyu Pang

Department of Electronics, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Tool Use in VLMs Tool-Using Vision-Language Agents

Sep 24, 2026cs.CV

Exploiting answer-invariant redundancies in satellite imagery for efficient VLM inference on edge

Onboard vision-language models could enable satellites to answer queries directly, but exhaustive tiled inference over high-resolution imagery is slow and energy-intensive. We identify answer-invariant token redundancy (AITR): image tiles and vision tokens that can be removed without changing the final answer. We present Rift, a two-stage system that performs query-conditioned tile pruning followed by elastic prefill to reduce token budget. We evaluate it on LLaVA-1.5 7B running on Jetson AGX Orin. Compared with exhaustive tiled inference, Rift reduces energy by 78% and latency by 69%, while increasing accuracy from 45% to 73%.

Ishani Janveja, Davis Zhang, Seoyul Oh +1

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing VQA Efficient VLM Inference Remote Sensing Visual Token Pruning

Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

GeoNLI - A Natural Language Interpreter for Satellite Imagery

Multi-modal multitasking models have shown strong performance on remote sensing datasets. However, because these models are trained on heterogeneous data and vary across tasks, designing a unified model that performs well in captioning, visual question answering (VQA), and visual grounding remains challenging. In this work, we evaluate several models on the VRS Bench and NWPU-VHR-10 datasets. The EarthMind model demonstrates strong results in both captioning and VQA. For grounding, we propose multiple pipelines - RemoteSAM-SAM-v1, RemoteSAM-SAM-v2, and DiffuSAM - and ultimately adopt a majority-voting ensemble across EarthMind, RemoteSAM, SAM3, Falcon, RemoteSAM-SAM3-v1, RemoteSAM-SAM3-v2, and DiffuSAM predictions. Our unified, modular pipeline integrates advanced SAM variants with multimodal LLMs to jointly perform captioning, VQA, and grounding. It achieves 82% accuracy on captioning and 83.32% on VQA, with 90.94%, 52.04%, and 92.06% for binary, numeric, and semantic question types respectively. For grounding, it attains 64.94% accuracy. By combining diverse VLMs with our custom RemoteSAM-SAM3 models through ensemble majority voting, the system delivers more accurate and consistent remote-sensing understanding than task-specific approaches.

Ashutosh Gandhe, Anupam Rawat, Geet Sethi +5

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing VQA Unified Multimodal Models Visual Grounding Remote Sensing Benchmarks Remote Sensing Visual Grounding

Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

A Unified Framework and Dataset for Oriented Object Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing

Visual grounding in remote sensing images aims to locate objects described by referring expressions. Most existing methods predict horizontal bounding boxes, which are often inaccurate for objects with arbitrary orientations. To address this limitation, we introduce O

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-VG, a family of models for oriented object visual grounding with three complementary designs. Specifically, O

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-VG-Trans is a cross-modality transformer for oriented object visual grounding. It establishes a strong discriminative foundation for the model family. Building upon it, O

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-VG-Uni predicts universal oriented proposals for possible foreground objects without specific text prompts. It also supports object retrieval through cached proposal embeddings. Using these universal oriented proposals as input prompts, O

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-VG-VLM is an autoregressive vision-language model. It generates oriented box token blocks in parallel through multi-token prediction. In addition, we construct DIOR-R-RSVG, a dataset for oriented object visual grounding in remote sensing images. It provides image, expression, and oriented box triplets for training and evaluation. Together, the O

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-VG family provides a flexible framework that spans discriminative transformers and generative vision-language models. It achieves superior performance across multiple benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/wokaikaixinxin/ai4rs.

Zeyu Ding, Yong Zhou, Jiaqi Zhao +5

School of Computer Science and Technology/School of Artificial Intelligence, the Mine Digitization Engineering Research Center of the Ministry of Education, and Jiangsu Provincial Industrial Technology Engineering Center for Intelligent Sensing and Emergency IoT in Underground Space, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116, China · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Vision-Language Grounding Visual Grounding Remote Sensing Benchmarks Remote Sensing Visual Grounding

Sep 20, 2026cs.LG

A multi-temporal dataset for mapping burned areas in the Brazilian Cerrado using time series of remote sensing imagery

This paper introduces a multi-temporal tabular dataset derived from satellite images to map burned areas in the Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, in Goiás, Brazil, covering the years 2020 to 2022. The dataset contains blue, green, red, and near-infrared bands, as well as the BAI, EVI, GEMI, NDVI, and NDWI spectral indices from the WFI sensor on the CBERS-4A, CBERS-4, and AMAZONIA-1 satellites, organized into a regular grid. We applied the Random Forest classifier to develop and validate models based on samples labeled as totally burned, partially burned, and non-burned. Two classification approaches were tested: one combining burned and non-burned areas into binary classes and another distinguishing between totally burned (TB), partially burned (PB), and non-burned (NB) classes. Seven validation approaches assessed different post-classification combinations, focusing on accuracy, precision, recall, and intersection over union (IoU) metrics. Results showed higher IoU when TB, PB, and NB were used as individual classes and TB was reclassified as burned area (BA) while PB and NB were grouped as non-burned. Comparing the annual results of this approach to the MCD64A1 product, the errors of omission for the BA class were 22% in 2020, 28% in 2021 and 59% in 2022, while the errors of commission were 46%, 43% and 46%, respectively. The study highlights the utility of the WFI sensor for burned area mapping without inter-satellite spectral calibration and suggests further exploration with other machine learning algorithms to evaluate the dataset potential and limitations.

Alisson Cleiton de Oliveira, Thales Sehn Körting

Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division (DIOTG), National Institute for Space Research (INPE), São José dos Campos, SP, Brazil

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing Benchmarks

Sep 17, 2026cs.CV

Task-Oriented Semantic Feature Transmission for Multi-Task Satellite Remote Sensing over Low-SNR Channels

Conventional satellite remote sensing transmission follows a reconstruct-then-infer paradigm that optimizes pixel-level fidelity, creating an objective mismatch with downstream tasks such as classification and detection, especially at low SNR. This paper investigates a task-oriented framework that bypasses image reconstruction and directly transmits semantic features extracted by a multitask-pretrained backbone. A lightweight channel adaptation module (CAM) compresses feature dimensionality for bandwidth reduction, and a feature restorer recovers task-relevant structure after channel corruption. With the backbone frozen, the CAM and task-specific downstream heads are jointly optimized with task and feature-level supervision under random-SNR training. Under the adopted AWGN setting, experiments on scene classification and object detection show consistent gains over reconstruction-oriented JSCC baselines across different SNR conditions, with the largest improvements in the low-SNR regime.

Shuoyuan Sun, Hongyu Wang, Mugen Peng +1

State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Semantic Communication Task-Oriented Semantic Communication Remote Sensing

Sep 16, 2026cs.CV

PDA++: Field-Aligned Planning and Scene-Adaptive Insertion in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing recognition is often constrained by scarce observations of rare targets and costly annotations, making realistic synthetic augmentation particularly valuable for few-shot and long-tailed scenarios. Object insertion provides an efficient way to increase target diversity while preserving authentic background scenes, but realistic insertion in overhead imagery requires the generated target to adapt coherently to its surrounding environment. To this end, we propose PDA++, a unified environment-aware object insertion framework organized as Plan, Decouple, and Assimilate. Planning determines scene-compatible poses through an affordance field that combines geometric clearance with structure- and scale-aware cues. Decoupling introduces a pose-conditioned background that provides precise spatial guidance together with target-scene context, allowing the reference object to preserve its identity while adapting to the target observation. This construction also naturally provides pixel-level masks for segmentation augmentation. Assimilation further improves local coherence by aligning multi-scale texture distributions through optimal transport. On the optical benchmark, PDA++ achieves a whole-image FID of 6.28 and improves average few-shot recognition mAP50 by 17.69 points, corresponding to a 28.8% relative gain over the real-data baseline. On SAR imagery, it improves ship detection by 4.10 mAP50 points and remains effective under cross-dataset transfer and amorphous-target insertion. Code is available at https://github.com/lisheyu972/PDA_PLUS.

Xianchi Dong, Yingyan Hou, Chao Ren +6

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Synthetic Data Augmentation

Sep 9, 2026cs.CV

ScopeMamba-YOLO: Widening the Perceptual Scope Inward and Outward for Small Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and remote sensing imagery requires preserving high-resolution detail while modeling long-range context. Adding a stride-4 detection level and removing the stride-32 stage benefits tiny targets but weakens peripheral spatial support, whereas directly inserting selective scanning into the main feature path can interfere with weak local cues. We propose ScopeMamba-YOLO, built around an off-path, zero-gated selective-scanning principle that decouples contextual modeling from the convolutional stream. The principle is instantiated by a Cascaded Global-Context Module (CGCM) in the backbone and a Selective-Scan PAN (SS-PAN) in the neck. An Adaptive Multi-scale Strip (AMS) Block reduces the cost of high-resolution feature extraction, while a Scale-Adaptive DFL (SA-DFL) head reallocates distributional support and regression capacity across scales with only 0.008M additional parameters. Controlled experiments show that matched main-path selective scanning reduces mAP50 by 0.98 pp, whereas off-path CGCM improves the final configuration by 0.67 pp over the three-seed no-CGCM mean; operator controls indicate that this gain is not explained by auxiliary branch capacity alone. ERF analysis further shows that the complete context pathway increases the peripheral energy ratio from 0.008 to 0.090 at stride 8. On VisDrone-2019, ScopeMamba-S achieves 50.8% mAP50 with 3.57M parameters, exceeding YOLOv8s by 10.8 pp while using 32% of its parameters; ScopeMamba-M reaches 52.6% mAP50 with 6.48M parameters. Consistent improvements are also observed on AI-TOD, especially for very-tiny and tiny objects.

Junjie Fan, Yijun Mai, Linduo Wei +5

School of Intellectual Property, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China · School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing Small Object Detection Selective SSMs Small Object Detection Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Aerial Object Detection

Sep 8, 2026cs.LG

Uncertainty-Aware Sea-Ice Type Mapping with Multiple Ice Charts

Sea-ice stage of development (SoD) describes the age and associated thickness of sea ice and provides important information for navigation, and operational ice monitoring. SoD labels are obtained from operational ice charts, where trained analysts interpret satellite observations and assign standardized stage codes to regions with similar ice conditions. These codes often represent ranges of compatible ice thicknesses rather than exact physical values. Deep-learning methods can automate SoD mapping and commonly adopt operational ice charts as reference labels for training. These annotations are not exact, however; this is because chart interpretation relies on analyst judgement and on the observations available at the time, so different ice services may assign different SoD labels to the same conditions. We term this variation across independently produced expert annotations multi-annotator label uncertainty; collapsing the annotations into a single deterministic target discards this variation. A second source of uncertainty originates in the learned model itself. In this paper, we quantify both sources: annotation uncertainty from disagreement among independent ice-service charts and model uncertainty from the learned predictive models. We then evaluate their relationship by testing whether model uncertainty is higher where ice services disagree. We observe that supervision incorporating information from multiple annotators can improve this correspondence, with soft supervision achieving the highest overall correlation of 0.256. The relationship becomes substantially stronger near the ice edge, where model predictive uncertainty closely tracks multi-annotator disagreement, reaching a correlation of 0.704 within 0--10 km. Among the uncertainty-estimation approaches, Monte Carlo dropout provides the best-calibrated confidence estimates, with an expected calibration error of 0.050.

Samira Alkaee Taleghan, Younghyun Koo, Andrew P. Barrett +1

University of Colorado Denver Denver, Colorado, USA · National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder Boulder, Colorado, USA

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Annotator Disagreement Uncertainty Quantification Remote Sensing Uncertainty Calibration

Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

Exploring the Potential of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training for Multi-Source Remote Sensing Data

Contrastive language-image learning (CLIP) has become a key paradigm for remote sensing vision-language understanding. However, existing remote sensing contrastive learning methods are mostly built on RGB-oriented CLIP architectures, making it difficult to exploit heterogeneous sensors such as SAR, multi-spectral imaging (MSI), and hyperspectral imaging (HSI). To address this limitation, we propose OmniRSCLIP, an end-to-end contrastive learning framework that supports multi-source sensor inputs for remote sensing vision-language modeling. The key idea is to extend CLIP beyond its fixed RGB input interface without breaking the pretrained visual knowledge. To this end, OmniRSCLIP introduces Spectral-Spatial Basis Decomposition (SSBD), which formulates arbitrary-channel adaptation as a basis recomposition problem: pretrained CLIP patch embeddings provide transferable spatial bases, while wavelength-conditioned coefficients span sensor-specific embedding kernels within a constrained visual prior space. This design avoids forcing heterogeneous sensors into a fixed-channel input space, while aligning them in a unified image-text semantic space. We further introduce a spectral-context-aware mask-based contrastive learning scheme to suppress modality-specific redundant features and enhance fine-grained image-text alignment. Finally, to support multi-modal training, we construct OmniRS5M, the first large-scale remote sensing image-text corpus covering RGB, SAR, MSI, and HSI. Experiments on retrieval, zero-shot classification, and semantic localization show that OmniRSCLIP preserves strong RGB-domain performance while effectively extending CLIP to heterogeneous remote sensing modalities.

Xiangyang Miao, Kelu Yao, Yekai Huang +7

School of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University · Space-based Computing System Research Center, Zhejiang Lab

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Multimodal Pretraining Remote Sensing Remote Sensing Benchmarks Multimodal Contrastive Learning

Sep 2, 2026cs.CV

Lightweight Adaptation of General-Purpose VLMs for Multispectral and SAR Image Understanding

General-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) now support strong visual recognition, instruction following, and generation. However, most pretrained visual encoders are built around three-channel natural images and do not directly accommodate observations such as native multispectral measurements or synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Adapting VLMs to these sensors typically requires dedicated encoders and domain pretraining, slowing the reuse of stronger general-purpose checkpoints. We show that the multi-image interface of general-purpose VLMs offers a lightweight alternative. Our protocol renders each observation as five optical views and one SAR view, names them in the prompt, and adapts the language network and selected visual transformer blocks with LoRA. This exposes band composites, spectral indices, and radar backscatter through an existing visual interface. For land-cover recognition, structured supervision couples predicted classes with sensor evidence. We further construct preference pairs in which a true label is omitted while its supporting evidence is retained, encouraging complete predictions that remain consistent with the observations. On a balanced six-class land-cover benchmark derived from BigEarthNet-v2, the adapted Qwen3-VL reaches 0.8275 micro F1. The same input and adaptation protocol improves all four tested VLM architectures and transfers to Sen1Floods11 flood verification and BigEarthNet.txt captioning. Image removal and mismatch controls show that the adapted models use the supplied sensor observations. Together, these results demonstrate that VLMs can be repurposed for multispectral and SAR tasks through rendered inputs and compact LoRA adaptation, without training a new foundation model.

Shanji Liu, Kelu Yao, Junxiao Xue +5

Zhejiang University · Zhejiang Lab

VLM Adaptation Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing Land Cover Classification

Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

RingMoClaw: An Experience-Inspired Multi-Agent Framework for Self-Evolving Research in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing visual models have continuously advanced various interpretation tasks. However, the research process behind model improvement still heavily relies on manual expertise, requiring extensive trial-and-error iterations in model design, data processing, and performance diagnosis. Existing agent-based approaches mainly focus on task execution and workflow orchestration, while lacking the capability of autonomous research iteration for continuous performance optimization. To address this issue, we propose RingMoClaw, an experience-inspired self-evolving multi-agent framework for remote sensing visual interpretation. RingMoClaw integrates a research branch, a quality-control branch, and a dual-stream dynamic experience bus to establish a closed-loop optimization process covering strategy generation, experiment execution, independent review, and experience accumulation. The heterogeneous Critic mechanism provides stage-wise diagnosis and feedback, while the dual-stream experience bus incorporates external knowledge and internal experimental experience to guide strategy evolution and eliminate ineffective searches. Extensive experiments on four remote sensing downstream tasks, including object detection, scene classification, semantic segmentation, and change detection, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of RingMoClaw. Compared with the corresponding baseline models, RingMoClaw improves performance by 1.84% mAP

_{50}

on object detection and achieves consistent gains across the other three tasks, while reducing the required evolution steps by over 40% compared with existing research automation frameworks. These results suggest that RingMoClaw offers a feasible route from task execution toward continuous research driven model evolution in remote sensing.

Kaiyue Kang, Qixuan He, Peijin Wang +9

Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China · School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China +1

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Memory-Augmented Agents Autonomous Research Agents Self-Evolving Agents

Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

A Composition-Aware Pretraining Framework for Geospatial Foundation Models

Geospatial foundation models have emerged as state-of-the-art methods for downstream Earth observation tasks. However, existing pretraining methodologies process imagery through a single-concept lens, failing to capture the highly compositional nature of complex satellite scenes. We propose a composition-aware pretraining framework that explicitly encodes fractional land-cover mixtures. Each satellite image cell is mapped to a histogram representing its fractional land-cover distribution, which we term the "composition target". These targets serve as the primary prediction objective and are distilled into the backbone using Earth Mover's Distance. Experimental evaluation shows that composition-aware pretraining yields substantial gains on region-level understanding tasks requiring semantic similarity judgment, including zero-shot image retrieval and scene classification, while remaining competitive on tasks requiring fine-grained spatial precision, such as segmentation and object detection. With a 36.8M-parameter backbone, our framework outperforms SatMAE and Prithvi-EO-2.0, which contain 303M and 600M parameters, respectively, in most retrieval and scene classification settings. On the fine-grained ForestNet-12 dataset, a rigorous testbed for compositional discrimination, our method boosts baseline mAP@10 from 0.279 to 0.434, a 55.6% relative improvement, providing direct evidence for the effectiveness of explicit composition modeling. The code implementation can be found at https://github.com/05kashyap/GFM_Composition_Pretraining

Aryan Kashyap Naveen, Abhishek Srinivas, Pranav Moothedath +1

National Institute of Technology, Karnataka · Surathkal, Karnataka, India · Visa Inc +2

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Representation Learning Geospatial Foundation Models Geospatial Representation Learning Compositional Representation Learning

Aug 30, 2026cs.CV

A Hybrid State-Space Approach for Census-Tract Population Estimation

Sequence models---the architecture family behind large language models and, increasingly, state-of-the-art image recognition---have redefined how machines learn from high-dimensional data. Yet population estimation from satellite imagery, a task that underpins infrastructure planning, public health, and disaster response, has scarcely benefited: leading systems still bind population to a uniform raster, disaggregating census counts onto grid cells through weighting surfaces built from ancillary data (e.g., in WorldPop and LandScan), which can introduce systematic spatial bias, and predicting population per grid cell with convolutional neural networks. In this approach, the administrative-unit structure in which the census was actually collected is discarded. We close this gap with MambaPop, which renders each administrative unit as a single polygon-masked satellite image and treats tract-level population estimation as a sequence-modeling problem over its image patches, pairing each tract image directly with its population label and eliminating the disaggregation step entirely. Built on the hybrid state-space--attention MambaVision backbone, MambaPop is, to our knowledge, the first method to learn population directly from an administrative unit's own image as well as the first to apply a state-space based (Mamba) hybrid architecture to the population estimation task. Across all

\sim

84{,}000 contiguous-US census tracts of the 2020 census, MambaPop attains a mean absolute error (MAE) of

1{,}141

persons per tract, matching the strongest convolutional baseline (YOLOv11, MAE

1{,}122

).

Jackson R. Ye, Alexandre V. Morozov

Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing

Aug 30, 2026cs.MA

RAPIDMap: Rapid Multi-Agent Pipeline for Interpretable Disaster Mapping from Satellite and Street-view Imagery

Rapid and reliable disaster mapping of impacted areas, damaged infrastructure, and affected populations is essential for emergency response and recovery. However, existing AI-based approaches often require extensive manual annotation, lack cross-hazard generalization, and rely on single-modal observations. To address these challenges, this paper proposes RAPIDMap, a rapid multi-agent pipeline for zero-shot interpretable disaster mapping from satellite and street-view imagery. The framework integrates four intelligent agents: Disaster Perception Agent (DPA), Image Restoration Agent (IRA), Damage Recognition Agent (DRA), and Disaster Mapping Agent (DMA). By combining remote sensing and street-view data, RAPIDMap eliminates the need for manual fine-tuning, generalizes across multiple disaster categories, and generates structured, map-ready disaster intelligence with recovery recommendations.

Yifan Yang, Lei Zou

Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Disaster Damage Assessment Multimodal Agents

Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

LongEarth-R1: Benchmarking and Aligning Vision-Language Models for Long-Horizon Earth Observation Reasoning

Long-horizon Earth observation reasoning requires models to organize multi-stage geographic evolution, localize spatial changes, detect temporal anomalies, and infer future from extended image sequences. However, existing remote sensing vision-language models mainly focus on isolated images, image pairs, or short sequences, limiting reliable grounding in the relevant frames and regions. We introduce LongEarth-Bench, a benchmark containing approximately 120k question-answering samples derived from 117k unique images. Its sequences average 15.14 frames and extend to 30 frames, covering 12 tasks across evolution summarization, spatial reasoning, anomaly identification, and logical prediction. A 30k-sample subset further provides structured reasoning traces linking key frames and changed regions to final answers. We develop LongEarth through supervised fine-tuning with explicit sequence identifiers and structured chain-of-thought supervision. Building on LongEarth, LongEarth-R1 applies group relative policy optimization with format, temporal, and spatial rewards. LongEarth-R1 achieves the best results on all 12 long-sequence tasks while remaining competitive on standard remote sensing benchmarks.

Yupan Ding, Jing Xiao, Zhenyuan Zhang +4

School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China · School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China · Xi’an University of Electronic Science and Technology, Xi’an, China +1

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing VQA Remote Sensing VLM Reasoning Remote Sensing Benchmarks Long-Context VLMs

Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

Deep Learning based Detection of Fishing Vessels and Fishing Monitoring using Nightlight Images

The demand for maritime surveillance has given rise to the need for monitoring fishing vessel activities, particularly in addressing the challenge of "dark vessels" that operate without Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmission. This study presents a novel approach for detecting small-scale fishing vessels using nighttime light (NTL) imagery from the SDGSAT-1 satellite, combined with deep learning techniques to enhance fishing monitoring awareness along the western coast of India. A dual-branch YOLO11 architecture was developed to exploit both the 10-meter panchromatic and 40-meter RGB imagery from SDGSAT-1. The custom model architecture was specifically optimized for small object detection in NTL imagery, featuring parallel convolutional backbones that process both modalities before concatenation for enhanced feature extraction. The dual-branch YOLO11 model demonstrated optimal performance with a precision of 0.99, recall of 0.93, F1-score of 0.96, and mAP@50 of 0.96, significantly outperforming single-branch implementations of YOLOv5s, YOLOv8s, and standard YOLO11s architectures. When applied to the western coast of India, the model detected 31525 vessel instances across the temporal dataset spanning 2022-23. Cross-matching analysis with AIS data revealed that only 7146 (22.7%) of detected vessels had corresponding AIS transmissions, while 24379 (77.3%) were identified as potential dark vessels. Spatio-temporal analysis showed peak fishing activity during January-April, with a primary activity corridor parallel to the coastline within 50-100 km, corresponding to productive continental shelf areas. This research contributes to maritime surveillance capabilities by highlighting the effectiveness of nighttime lights satellite imagery for fishing vessel detection and provides valuable insights into fishing patterns and potential regulatory compliance issues in Indian waters.

Shantakar Mohanty, Prasun Kumar Gupta, Raian Vargas Maretto

Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO, Dehradun, India · University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), Enschede, The Netherlands

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Multispectral Object Detection Small Object Detection Object Detection

Aug 10, 2026astro-ph.EP

A Machine Learning Based Search for Lunar Anomalies

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been collecting high-resolution images (at around 0.5-2 meters per pixel linearly with its Narrow Angle Camera) of the Moon since 2009, amassing a large dataset of images and offering researchers the opportunity to study the surface of the Moon at unprecedented scale. Here, we aim to test the abilities of the Beta-Variational Autoencoder (VAE) created by Lesnikowski et al. (2024), an unsupervised learning model which identifies anomalous features across the Moon's surface, locating not only scientifically useful geologic formations such as rockfall deposits, fresh impact craters, irregular mare patches, or volcanic pits/collapsed lava tubes, but also artificial objects such as landed spacecraft. This investigation further gauged the model's ability to locate anomalous surface features, successfully recovering two places of interest (Plaskett Crater and Paracelsus C Crater) and numerous landed technological assets at a statistically significant rate.

Cameron Kelahan, Daniel Angerhausen, Adam Lesnikowski +1

University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom CV4 7AL · Universit`a degli Studi di Padova, Via 8 Febbraio, 2 - 35122 Padova, Italy · James Madison University, 800 South Main Street, Harrisonburg, VA 22807 +3

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Anomaly Detection

Aug 7, 2026cs.CV

Summarize First, Download Later: Onboard VLMs for Bandwidth-Efficient Earth Observation

Modern Earth observation (EO) satellites carry increasingly advanced sensors that produce vast volumes of high-resolution, multispectral data, yet downlink capacity remains a critical bottleneck -- often causing significant latency or the loss of valuable observations within limited contact windows. We propose a "Summarize First, Download Later" paradigm that exploits recent advances in onboard edge computing and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Rather than indiscriminately downlinking raw imagery, the system follows a three-phase interaction protocol: the satellite first transmits concise natural language summaries generated by a quantized onboard VLM; ground operators then issue targeted Visual Question Answering (VQA) queries to verify scene relevance (e.g., wildfires or maritime anomalies); and full-resolution images are downloaded only when critical information is confirmed. This transforms the downlink from passive bulk transfer into an active, semantics-aware dialogue. We implement and evaluate the system on a resource-constrained NVIDIA Jetson platform, and experiments on diverse remote sensing scenes show that the proposed strategy substantially reduces bandwidth consumption while accelerating time-to-insight for time-sensitive missions.

Junghwan Park, Sangcheol Sim, Woojin Cho +1

TelePIX · 07330, Seoul, South Korea

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Remote Sensing VQA Semantic Communication Remote Sensing

Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

On the Effectiveness of Adaptation Strategies for VLM-Based Federated Learning in Remote Sensing

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of deep learning models across decentralized image archives without requiring data centralization. This paradigm is particularly relevant in remote sensing (RS), where legal regulations, privacy concerns, and bandwidth constraints restrict data sharing. However, the presence of training data heterogeneity across clients (known as non-IID data) can impede convergence and limit the generalization capability of the aggregated global model. To mitigate the adverse effects of training data heterogeneity, vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged in FL due to their transferable representations, which have demonstrated robustness under distribution shifts. However, their large parameter size may substantially increase communication overhead and local computational complexity in federated settings. Therefore, it is crucial to select an appropriate VLM adaptation strategy that balances the generalization ability with the communication and computational constraints. To address this issue, in this paper, we present the first comparative study of VLM adaptation strategies for FL in the context of RS image classification. We investigate full fine-tuning, encoder-specific fine-tuning, prompt learning, and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) tuning, and analyze them with respect to three criteria: 1) generalization capability under non-IID data, 2) communication overhead, and 3) local computational complexity. Experiments on BigEarthNet-S2, EuroSAT, RESISC45, and ImageNet reveal distinct trade-offs between task specialization, cross-domain generalization, and efficiency. Based on our findings, we derive a guideline for the selection of an appropriate VLM adaptation strategy in FL for RS image classification under different operational constraints. The code of this work is publicly available at https://git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/FL-RS-VLM.

Simon Lösche, Barış Büyüktaş, Mathis Adler +3

BIFOLD - Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, 10587 Berlin, Germany · Technische Universität Berlin, 10623 Berlin, Germany · Orion Lab, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 15772 Athens, Greece +2

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Prompt Learning VLM Adaptation Non-IID Federated Learning Low-Rank Adaptation Federated Fine-Tuning

Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

ColorFD: A Finite-Difference Guided Black-Box Physical Adversarial Attack for Remote Sensing Object Detection

Although deep neural network-based remote sensing object detectors have achieved strong performance, they remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Existing studies mainly focus on digital or white-box settings, whereas black-box physical attacks remain underexplored. These attacks are often constrained by limited physical feasibility and inefficient optimization in high-dimensional search spaces. To address these challenges, this paper proposes ColorFD, a black-box physical attack based on multiple pure-color patches. The patch positions and color parameters are jointly optimized using Differential Evolution (DE). A target-wise fitness and selection mechanism evaluates the attack state of each target and preserves target-specific improvements during evolution. Two guidance strategies further constrain the patch search space. Key-region localization identifies sensitive regions through finite-difference color probing. Common-feature extraction provides category-level spatial priors and avoids repeated localization. Although evaluated on aircraft, the formulation is not inherently restricted to this category. Experiments on YOLOv3u, YOLOv5u, and Faster R-CNN show that ColorFD outperforms the tested black-box patch method across all evaluated detectors and remains competitive with strong white-box baselines. Physical-world experiments further demonstrate that the optimized pure-color patches can be transferred from the digital domain to real imaging conditions.

Tiannuo Guo, Guhang Qiu, Yuzhen Xie +3

College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China

Remote Sensing Image Understanding Adversarial Patch Attacks Remote Sensing Small Object Detection Black-Box Adversarial Attacks Physical Adversarial Attacks