Remote Sensing Visual Grounding

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Overview

Remote sensing visual grounding studies how to locate the objects or regions described by text in satellite, aerial, and sometimes video imagery, often returning boxes or pixel masks. Common approaches align language with image features using proposals, cross-modal attention, and contrastive learning; newer systems also use vision-language models, segmentation or diffusion models, and stepwise spatial reasoning. Benchmarks such as DIOR-RSVG and RRSIS-D test localization across varied scenes, while work increasingly examines multi-entity, cross-sensor, open-vocabulary, and video settings. A key tension is that accurate answers or confident locations may not be supported by the right visual evidence, and models still struggle with fine-grained relations, clutter, and generalization across domains.

Latest papers

CardsList

21 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. OBB-PBD: Extending Parallel Box Decoding to Oriented Bounding Boxes for Referring Expression Grounding in Aerial Imagery

    Oct 26, 2026Chang Woo Song, Yeong Jun KohVisual GroundingRemote Sensing Visual Grounding

    Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Republic of Korea

  2. From Sound to Sense: An Anatomy of Semantic Supervision for Speech-Driven Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing Imagery

    Oct 12, 2026Zhongyu PangConnectionist Temporal ClassificationMultimodal Grounding

    College of Electronic Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China

  3. Benchmarking Answer-Grounding Consistency in Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering

    Oct 9, 2026Ping Guo, Zhiqi Huang, Xinran Li +3Remote Sensing VQAVLM Evaluation

    Graduate School of Information, Production and Systems, Waseda University, Kitakyushu, Japan · School of Artificial Intelligence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China · School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China +1

  4. Knowing Whether, Not Just Where: Anchor-Probing Distillation for Open-Set Remote Sensing Visual Grounding

    Oct 9, 2026Zhihao Chang, Lei Zhai, Shuyuan Yang +1Visual GroundingRemote Sensing Visual Grounding

  5. GeoNLI - A Natural Language Interpreter for Satellite Imagery

    Sep 23, 2026Ashutosh Gandhe, Anupam Rawat, Geet Sethi +5Remote Sensing Visual GroundingRemote Sensing VQA

    Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

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

    Sep 23, 2026Zeyu Ding, Yong Zhou, Jiaqi Zhao +5Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingVision-Language Grounding

    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

  7. DeCo: Efficient Decouple-to-Couple Learning for Multi-Task Visual Grounding

    Sep 21, 2026Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Long Sun +5Multimodal Disentangled Representation LearningReferring Expression Segmentation

    Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University Xi’an, Shaanxi 710071, China

  8. GrabVG: Graph-Attentive Binding for Visual Grounding in UAV Imagery

    Aug 19, 2026Chaowei Wang, Yan Di, Jingjun Sun +5Visual GroundingRemote Sensing Visual Grounding

    Northwestern Polytechnical University · Harbin Institute of Technology · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

  9. Multimodal Large Language Models for Remote Sensing Image Understanding: Domain-Specific or General-Purpose?

    Jul 22, 2026Qiwei Ma, Chunping Qiu, Xinjun Cheng +5Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VQA

    School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China · Intelligent Game and Decision Lab (IGDL), Beijing, 100091, China · cYuelushan Center for Industrial Innovation, Changsha, 410082, China

  10. GeoSearcher: Anchor-Guided Progressive Reasoning for Remote Sensing Visual Grounding with Process Supervision

    Jul 1, 2026Dianyu Wang, Peirong Zhang, Xuyang Li +2Vision-Language GroundingVLM Reasoning

    Aerospace Information Research Institute, the Key Laboratory of Network Information System Technology (NIST), and the Key Laboratory of Target Cognition and Application Technology (TCAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China · School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

  11. ExACT: Exemplar-Driven Calibrated Refinement for Training-Free Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing Images

    Jun 27, 2026Zixiao Zhang, Lingling Li, Pei He +2Vision-Language GroundingVisual Grounding

    Xidian University

  12. Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding for Remote Sensing Images and Videos

    Jun 15, 2026Ke Li, Di Wang, Yongshan Zhu +5Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingTemporal Video Grounding

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China · Interdisciplinary Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710126, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China +2

  13. Improving Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing via Cluster-Guided Refinement and Model Ensemble Voting

    May 30, 2026Panav Shah, Geet Sethi, Ashutosh GandheRemote SensingVision-Language Grounding

    Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Mumbai, India · Indian Institute of Technology Bombay2026 Mumbai, India

  14. DiffuSAM: Diffusion Guided Zero-Shot Object Grounding for Remote Sensing Imagery

    Apr 20, 2026Geet Sethi, Panav Shah, Ashutosh Gandhe +1Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingDiffusion Model Guidance

    Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

  15. ProVG: Progressive Visual Grounding via Language Decoupling for Remote Sensing Imagery

    Apr 2, 2026Ke Li, Ting Wang, Di Wang +4Remote Sensing Visual GroundingRemote Sensing VLMs

    Xidian University, China · UC San Diego, USA · SUST, China

  16. BigEarthNet.txt: A Large-Scale Multi-Sensor Image-Text Dataset and Benchmark for Earth Observation

    Mar 31, 2026Johann-Ludwig Herzog, Mathis Jürgen Adler, Leonard Hackel +5Remote SensingRemote Sensing Benchmarks

    BIFOLD and Technische Universität Berlin · University of Trento · National Technical University and National Observatory of Athens

  17. OptiSAR-Net++: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Transformer-Free Framework for Cross-Domain Remote Sensing Visual Grounding

    Mar 25, 2026Xiaoyu Tang, Jun Dong, Jintao Cheng +1Remote SensingVision-Language Grounding

    School of Electronics and Information Engineering, and Xingzhi College, South China Normal University, Foshan 528225, China · School of Data Science and Engineering, and Xingzhi College, South China Normal University, Shanwei, 516600, China · Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China +1

  18. TerraScope: Pixel-Grounded Visual Reasoning for Earth Observation

    Mar 19, 2026Yan Shu, Bin Ren, Zhitong Xiong +4Remote Sensing VLMsGeospatial Reasoning

    University of Trento · MBZUAI · Technical University of Munich +1

  19. GroundSet: A Cadastral-Grounded Dataset for Spatial Understanding with Vector Data

    Mar 15, 2026Roger Ferrod, Maël Lecene, Krishna Sapkota +4VLM EvaluationRemote Sensing Image Understanding

    Université Paris Cité, LIPADE, F-75006 Paris, France · Google Research

  20. Think and Answer ME: Benchmarking and Exploring Multi-Entity Reasoning Grounding in Remote Sensing

    Mar 13, 2026Shuchang Lyu, Haiquan Wen, Guangliang Cheng +5Remote Sensing Visual GroundingVisual Grounding

    Beihang University, Beijing, China. · University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK. · Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

  21. OmniEarth: A Benchmark for Evaluating Vision-Language Models in Geospatial Tasks

    Mar 10, 2026Ronghao Fu, Haoran Liu, Weijie Zhang +4VLM EvaluationRemote Sensing Benchmarks

    Jilin University, Changchun, China · Chang Guang Satellite Technology, Changchun, China