Landsat-Bench: Datasets and Benchmarks for Landsat Foundation Models

The Landsat program offers over 50 years of globally consistent Earth imagery. However, the lack of benchmarks for this data constrains progress towards Landsat-based Geospatial Foundation Models (GFM). In this paper, we introduce Landsat-Bench, a suite of three benchmarks with Landsat imagery that adapt from existing remote sensing datasets -- EuroSAT-L, BigEarthNet-L, and LC100-L. We establish baseline and standardized evaluation methods across both common architectures and Landsat foundation models pretrained on the SSL4EO-L dataset. Notably, we provide evidence that SSL4EO-L pretrained GFMs extract better representations for downstream tasks in comparison to ImageNet, including performance gains of +4% OA and +5.1% mAP on EuroSAT-L and BigEarthNet-L.

Aerial Infrared Health Monitoring of Solar Photovoltaic Farms at Scale

Solar photovoltaic (PV) farms represent a major source of global renewable energy generation, yet their true operational efficiency often remains unknown at scale. In this paper, we present a comprehensive, data-driven framework for large-scale airborne infrared inspection of North American solar installations. Leveraging high-resolution thermal imagery, we construct and curate a geographically diverse dataset encompassing thousands of PV sites, enabling machine learning-based detection and localization of defects that are not detectable in the visible spectrum. Our pipeline integrates advanced image processing, georeferencing, and airborne thermal infrared anomaly detection to provide rigorous estimates of performance losses. We highlight practical considerations in aerial data collection, annotation methodologies, and model deployment across a wide range of environmental and operational conditions. Our work delivers new insights into the reliability of large-scale solar assets and serves as a foundation for ongoing research on performance trends, predictive maintenance, and scalable analytics in the renewable energy sector.

Deep EEG Super-Resolution: Upsampling EEG Spatial Resolution with Generative Adversarial Networks

Electroencephalography (EEG) activity contains a wealth of information about what is happening within the human brain. Recording more of this data has the potential to unlock endless future applications. However, the cost of EEG hardware is increasingly expensive based upon the number of EEG channels being recorded simultaneously. We combat this problem in this paper by proposing a novel deep EEG super-resolution (SR) approach based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). This approach can produce high spatial resolution EEG data from low resolution samples, by generating channel-wise upsampled data to effectively interpolate numerous missing channels, thus reducing the need for expensive EEG equipment. We tested the performance using an EEG dataset from a mental imagery task. Our proposed GAN model provided 10^4 fold and 10^2 fold reduction in mean-squared error (MSE) and mean-absolute error (MAE), respectively, over the baseline bicubic interpolation method. We further validate our method by training a classifier on the original classification task, which displayed minimal loss in accuracy while using the super-resolved data. The proposed SR EEG by GAN is a promising approach to improve the spatial resolution of low density EEG headsets.

Solar Panel Mapping via Oriented Object Detection

Maintaining the integrity of solar power plants is a vital component in dealing with the current climate crisis. This process begins with analysts creating a detailed map of a plant with the coordinates of every solar panel, making it possible to quickly locate and mitigate potential faulty solar panels. However, this task is extremely tedious and is not scalable for the ever increasing capacity of solar power across the globe. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for detecting individual solar panels using a rotated object detection architecture. We evaluate our approach on a diverse dataset of solar power plants collected from across the United States and report a mAP score of 83.3%.

FLAVARS: A Multimodal Foundational Language and Vision Alignment Model for Remote Sensing

Remote sensing imagery is dense with objects and contextual visual information. There is a recent trend to combine paired satellite images and text captions for pretraining performant encoders for downstream tasks. However, while contrastive image-text methods like CLIP enable vision-language alignment and zero-shot classification ability, vision-only downstream performance tends to degrade compared to image-only pretraining, such as MAE. In this paper, we propose FLAVARS, a pretraining method that combines the best of both contrastive learning and masked modeling, along with geospatial alignment via contrastive location encoding. We find that FLAVARS significantly outperforms a baseline of SkyCLIP for vision-only tasks such as KNN classification and semantic segmentation, +6\% mIOU on SpaceNet1, while retaining the ability to perform zero-shot classification, unlike MAE pretrained methods.

Depth Any Canopy: Leveraging Depth Foundation Models for Canopy Height Estimation

Estimating global tree canopy height is crucial for forest conservation and climate change applications. However, capturing high-resolution ground truth canopy height using LiDAR is expensive and not available globally. An efficient alternative is to train a canopy height estimator to operate on single-view remotely sensed imagery. The primary obstacle to this approach is that these methods require significant training data to generalize well globally and across uncommon edge cases. Recent monocular depth estimation foundation models have show strong zero-shot performance even for complex scenes. In this paper we leverage the representations learned by these models to transfer to the remote sensing domain for measuring canopy height. Our findings suggest that our proposed Depth Any Canopy, the result of fine-tuning the Depth Anything v2 model for canopy height estimation, provides a performant and efficient solution, surpassing the current state-of-the-art with superior or comparable performance using only a fraction of the computational resources and parameters. Furthermore, our approach requires less than \$1.30 in compute and results in an estimated carbon footprint of 0.14 kgCO2. Code, experimental results, and model checkpoints are openly available at https://github.com/DarthReca/depth-any-canopy.

Estimating Earthquake Magnitude in Sentinel-1 Imagery via Ranking

Earthquakes are commonly estimated using physical seismic stations, however, due to the installation requirements and costs of these stations, global coverage quickly becomes impractical. An efficient and lower-cost alternative is to develop machine learning models to globally monitor earth observation data to pinpoint regions impacted by these natural disasters. However, due to the small amount of historically recorded earthquakes, this becomes a low-data regime problem requiring algorithmic improvements to achieve peak performance when learning to regress earthquake magnitude. In this paper, we propose to pose the estimation of earthquake magnitudes as a metric-learning problem, training models to not only estimate earthquake magnitude from Sentinel-1 satellite imagery but to additionally rank pairwise samples. Our experiments show at max a 30%+ improvement in MAE over prior regression-only based methods, particularly transformer-based architectures.

Barely-Visible Surface Crack Detection for Wind Turbine Sustainability

The production of wind energy is a crucial part of sustainable development and reducing the reliance on fossil fuels. Maintaining the integrity of wind turbines to produce this energy is a costly and time-consuming task requiring repeated inspection and maintenance. While autonomous drones have proven to make this process more efficient, the algorithms for detecting anomalies to prevent catastrophic damage to turbine blades have fallen behind due to some dangerous defects, such as hairline cracks, being barely-visible. Existing datasets and literature are lacking and tend towards detecting obvious and visible defects in addition to not being geographically diverse. In this paper we introduce a novel and diverse dataset of barely-visible hairline cracks collected from numerous wind turbine inspections. To prove the efficacy of our dataset, we detail our end-to-end deployed turbine crack detection pipeline from the image acquisition stage to the use of predictions in providing automated maintenance recommendations to extend the life and efficiency of wind turbines.

A Change Detection Reality Check

In recent years, there has been an explosion of proposed change detection deep learning architectures in the remote sensing literature. These approaches claim to offer state-of the-art performance on different standard benchmark datasets. However, has the field truly made significant progress? In this paper we perform experiments which conclude a simple U-Net segmentation baseline without training tricks or complicated architectural changes is still a top performer for the task of change detection.

Seeing the roads through the trees: A benchmark for modeling spatial dependencies with aerial imagery

Fully understanding a complex high-resolution satellite or aerial imagery scene often requires spatial reasoning over a broad relevant context. The human object recognition system is able to understand object in a scene over a long-range relevant context. For example, if a human observes an aerial scene that shows sections of road broken up by tree canopy, then they will be unlikely to conclude that the road has actually been broken up into disjoint pieces by trees and instead think that the canopy of nearby trees is occluding the road. However, there is limited research being conducted to understand long-range context understanding of modern machine learning models. In this work we propose a road segmentation benchmark dataset, Chesapeake Roads Spatial Context (RSC), for evaluating the spatial long-range context understanding of geospatial machine learning models and show how commonly used semantic segmentation models can fail at this task. For example, we show that a U-Net trained to segment roads from background in aerial imagery achieves an 84% recall on unoccluded roads, but just 63.5% recall on roads covered by tree canopy despite being trained to model both the same way. We further analyze how the performance of models changes as the relevant context for a decision (unoccluded roads in our case) varies in distance. We release the code to reproduce our experiments and dataset of imagery and masks to encourage future research in this direction -- https://github.com/isaaccorley/ChesapeakeRSC.