Abstract:Fine-grained crop type classification serves as the fundamental basis for large-scale crop mapping and plays a vital role in ensuring food security. It requires simultaneous capture of both phenological dynamics (obtained from multi-temporal satellite data like Sentinel-2) and subtle spectral variations (demanding nanometer-scale spectral resolution from hyperspectral imagery). Research combining these two modalities remains scarce currently due to challenges in hyperspectral data acquisition and crop types annotation costs. To address these issues, we construct a hierarchical hyperspectral crop dataset (H2Crop) by integrating 30m-resolution EnMAP hyperspectral data with Sentinel-2 time series. With over one million annotated field parcels organized in a four-tier crop taxonomy, H2Crop establishes a vital benchmark for fine-grained agricultural crop classification and hyperspectral image processing. We propose a dual-stream Transformer architecture that synergistically processes these modalities. It coordinates two specialized pathways: a spectral-spatial Transformer extracts fine-grained signatures from hyperspectral EnMAP data, while a temporal Swin Transformer extracts crop growth patterns from Sentinel-2 time series. The designed hierarchical classification head with hierarchical fusion then simultaneously delivers multi-level crop type classification across all taxonomic tiers. Experiments demonstrate that adding hyperspectral EnMAP data to Sentinel-2 time series yields a 4.2% average F1-scores improvement (peaking at 6.3%). Extensive comparisons also confirm our method's higher accuracy over existing deep learning approaches for crop type classification and the consistent benefits of hyperspectral data across varying temporal windows and crop change scenarios. Codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/flyakon/H2Crop.
Abstract:Fine-grained crop classification is crucial for precision agriculture and food security monitoring. It requires simultaneous capture of both phenological dynamics (obtained from multi-temporal satellite data like Sentinel-2) and subtle spectral variations (demanding nanometer-scale spectral resolution from hyperspectral imagery). Research combining these two modalities remains scarce currently due to challenges in hyperspectral data acquisition and crop types annotation costs. To address these issues, we construct a hierarchical hyperspectral crop dataset (H2Crop) by integrating 30m-resolution EnMAP hyperspectral data with Sentinel-2 time series. With over one million annotated field parcels organized in a four-tier crop taxonomy, H2Crop establishes a vital benchmark for fine-grained agricultural crop classification and hyperspectral image processing. We propose a dual-stream Transformer architecture that synergistically processes these modalities. It coordinates two specialized pathways: a spectral-spatial Transformer extracts fine-grained signatures from hyperspectral EnMAP data, while a temporal Swin Transformer extracts crop growth patterns from Sentinel-2 time series. The designed hierarchy classification heads with hierarchical fusion then simultaneously delivers multi-level classification across all taxonomic tiers. Experiments demonstrate that adding hyperspectral EnMAP data to Sentinel-2 time series yields a 4.2% average F1-scores improvement (peaking at 6.3%). Extensive comparisons also confirming our method's higher accuracy over existing deep learning approaches for crop type classification and the consistent benefits of hyperspectral data across varying temporal windows and crop change scenarios. Codes and dataset will be available at https://github.com/flyakon/H2Crop and www.glass.hku.hk Keywords: Crop type classification, precision agriculture, remote sensing, deep learning, hyperspectral data, Sentinel-2 time series, fine-grained crops
Abstract:High-resolution (HR) remote sensing imagery plays a vital role in a wide range of applications, including urban planning and environmental monitoring. However, due to limitations in sensors and data transmission links, the images acquired in practice often suffer from resolution degradation. Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution (RSISR) aims to reconstruct HR images from low-resolution (LR) inputs, providing a cost-effective and efficient alternative to direct HR image acquisition. Existing RSISR methods primarily focus on low-level characteristics in pixel space, while neglecting the high-level understanding of remote sensing scenes. This may lead to semantically inconsistent artifacts in the reconstructed results. Motivated by this observation, our work aims to explore the role of high-level semantic knowledge in improving RSISR performance. We propose a Semantic-Guided Super-Resolution framework, SeG-SR, which leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to extract semantic knowledge from input images and uses it to guide the super resolution (SR) process. Specifically, we first design a Semantic Feature Extraction Module (SFEM) that utilizes a pretrained VLM to extract semantic knowledge from remote sensing images. Next, we propose a Semantic Localization Module (SLM), which derives a series of semantic guidance from the extracted semantic knowledge. Finally, we develop a Learnable Modulation Module (LMM) that uses semantic guidance to modulate the features extracted by the SR network, effectively incorporating high-level scene understanding into the SR pipeline. We validate the effectiveness and generalizability of SeG-SR through extensive experiments: SeG-SR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two datasets and consistently delivers performance improvements across various SR architectures. Codes can be found at https://github.com/Mr-Bamboo/SeG-SR.
Abstract:Accurate crop mapping fundamentally relies on modeling multi-scale spatiotemporal patterns, where spatial scales range from individual field textures to landscape-level context, and temporal scales capture both short-term phenological transitions and full growing-season dynamics. Transformer-based remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) offer promising potential for crop mapping due to their innate ability for unified spatiotemporal processing. However, current RSFMs remain suboptimal for crop mapping: they either employ fixed spatiotemporal windows that ignore the multi-scale nature of crop systems or completely disregard temporal information by focusing solely on spatial patterns. To bridge these gaps, we present AgriFM, a multi-source remote sensing foundation model specifically designed for agricultural crop mapping. Our approach begins by establishing the necessity of simultaneous hierarchical spatiotemporal feature extraction, leading to the development of a modified Video Swin Transformer architecture where temporal down-sampling is synchronized with spatial scaling operations. This modified backbone enables efficient unified processing of long time-series satellite inputs. AgriFM leverages temporally rich data streams from three satellite sources including MODIS, Landsat-8/9 and Sentinel-2, and is pre-trained on a global representative dataset comprising over 25 million image samples supervised by land cover products. The resulting framework incorporates a versatile decoder architecture that dynamically fuses these learned spatiotemporal representations, supporting diverse downstream tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate AgriFM's superior performance over conventional deep learning approaches and state-of-the-art general-purpose RSFMs across all downstream tasks. Codes will be available at https://github.com/flyakon/AgriFM.
Abstract:The advancement of remote sensing technology has improved the spatial resolution of satellite imagery, facilitating more detailed visual representations for diverse interpretations. However, existing methods exhibit limited generalization capabilities across varied applications. While some contemporary foundation models demonstrate potential, they are hindered by insufficient cross-task adaptability and primarily process low-resolution imagery of restricted sizes, thus failing to fully exploit high-resolution data or leverage comprehensive large-scene semantics. Crucially, remote sensing imagery differs fundamentally from natural images, as key foreground targets (eg., maritime objects, artificial structures) often occupy minimal spatial proportions (~1%) and exhibit sparse distributions. Efficiently modeling cross-task generalizable knowledge from lengthy 2D tokens (~100,000) poses a significant challenge yet remains critical for remote sensing image understanding. Motivated by the selective attention mechanisms inherent to the human visual system, we propose DynamicVis, a dynamic visual perception foundation model for remote sensing imagery. The framework integrates a novel dynamic region perception backbone based on the selective state space model, which strategically balances localized detail extraction with global contextual integration, enabling computationally efficient encoding of large-scale data while maintaining architectural scalability. To enhance cross-task knowledge transferring, we introduce a multi-instance learning paradigm utilizing meta-embedding representations, trained on million-scale region-level annotations. Evaluations across nine downstream tasks demonstrate the model's versatility. DynamicVis achieves multi-level feature modeling with exceptional efficiency, processing (2048x2048) pixels with 97 ms latency (6% of ViT's) and 833 MB GPU memory (3% of ViT's).
Abstract:Remote sensing novel view synthesis (NVS) offers significant potential for 3D interpretation of remote sensing scenes, with important applications in urban planning and environmental monitoring. However, remote sensing scenes frequently lack sufficient multi-view images due to acquisition constraints. While existing NVS methods tend to overfit when processing limited input views, advanced few-shot NVS methods are computationally intensive and perform sub-optimally in remote sensing scenes. This paper presents TriDF, an efficient hybrid 3D representation for fast remote sensing NVS from as few as 3 input views. Our approach decouples color and volume density information, modeling them independently to reduce the computational burden on implicit radiance fields and accelerate reconstruction. We explore the potential of the triplane representation in few-shot NVS tasks by mapping high-frequency color information onto this compact structure, and the direct optimization of feature planes significantly speeds up convergence. Volume density is modeled as continuous density fields, incorporating reference features from neighboring views through image-based rendering to compensate for limited input data. Additionally, we introduce depth-guided optimization based on point clouds, which effectively mitigates the overfitting problem in few-shot NVS. Comprehensive experiments across multiple remote sensing scenes demonstrate that our hybrid representation achieves a 30x speed increase compared to NeRF-based methods, while simultaneously improving rendering quality metrics over advanced few-shot methods (7.4% increase in PSNR, 12.2% in SSIM, and 18.7% in LPIPS). The code is publicly available at https://github.com/kanehub/TriDF
Abstract:Neural operators have shown great potential in surrogate modeling. However, training a well-performing neural operator typically requires a substantial amount of data, which can pose a major challenge in complex applications. In such scenarios, detailed physical knowledge can be unavailable or difficult to obtain, and collecting extensive data is often prohibitively expensive. To mitigate this challenge, we propose the Pseudo Physics-Informed Neural Operator (PPI-NO) framework. PPI-NO constructs a surrogate physics system for the target system using partial differential equations (PDEs) derived from simple, rudimentary physics principles, such as basic differential operators. This surrogate system is coupled with a neural operator model, using an alternating update and learning process to iteratively enhance the model's predictive power. While the physics derived via PPI-NO may not mirror the ground-truth underlying physical laws -- hence the term ``pseudo physics'' -- this approach significantly improves the accuracy of standard operator learning models in data-scarce scenarios, which is evidenced by extensive evaluations across five benchmark tasks and a fatigue modeling application.
Abstract:Referring remote sensing image segmentation is crucial for achieving fine-grained visual understanding through free-format textual input, enabling enhanced scene and object extraction in remote sensing applications. Current research primarily utilizes pre-trained language models to encode textual descriptions and align them with visual modalities, thereby facilitating the expression of relevant visual features. However, these approaches often struggle to establish robust alignments between fine-grained semantic concepts, leading to inconsistent representations across textual and visual information. To address these limitations, we introduce a referring remote sensing image segmentation foundational model, RSRefSeg. RSRefSeg leverages CLIP for visual and textual encoding, employing both global and local textual semantics as filters to generate referring-related visual activation features in the latent space. These activated features then serve as input prompts for SAM, which refines the segmentation masks through its robust visual generalization capabilities. Experimental results on the RRSIS-D dataset demonstrate that RSRefSeg outperforms existing methods, underscoring the effectiveness of foundational models in enhancing multimodal task comprehension. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/KyanChen/RSRefSeg}.
Abstract:Remote sensing image semantic change detection is a method used to analyze remote sensing images, aiming to identify areas of change as well as categorize these changes within images of the same location taken at different times. Traditional change detection methods often face challenges in generalizing across semantic categories in practical scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach called Semantic-CD, specifically designed for semantic change detection in remote sensing images. This method incorporates the open vocabulary semantics from the vision-language foundation model, CLIP. By utilizing CLIP's extensive vocabulary knowledge, our model enhances its ability to generalize across categories and improves segmentation through fully decoupled multi-task learning, which includes both binary change detection and semantic change detection tasks. Semantic-CD consists of four main components: a bi-temporal CLIP visual encoder for extracting features from bi-temporal images, an open semantic prompter for creating semantic cost volume maps with open vocabulary, a binary change detection decoder for generating binary change detection masks, and a semantic change detection decoder for producing semantic labels. Experimental results on the SECOND dataset demonstrate that Semantic-CD achieves more accurate masks and reduces semantic classification errors, illustrating its effectiveness in applying semantic priors from vision-language foundation models to SCD tasks.
Abstract:Generative foundation models have advanced large-scale text-driven natural image generation, becoming a prominent research trend across various vertical domains. However, in the remote sensing field, there is still a lack of research on large-scale text-to-image (text2image) generation technology. Existing remote sensing image-text datasets are small in scale and confined to specific geographic areas and scene types. Besides, existing text2image methods have struggled to achieve global-scale, multi-resolution controllable, and unbounded image generation. To address these challenges, this paper presents two key contributions: the Git-10M dataset and the Text2Earth foundation model. Git-10M is a global-scale image-text dataset comprising 10 million image-text pairs, 5 times larger than the previous largest one. The dataset covers a wide range of geographic scenes and contains resolution information, significantly surpassing existing datasets in both size and diversity. Building on Git-10M, we propose Text2Earth, a 1.3 billion parameter generative foundation model based on the diffusion framework to model global-scale remote sensing scenes. Text2Earth integrates a resolution guidance mechanism, enabling users to specify image resolutions. A dynamic condition adaptation strategy is proposed for training and inference to improve image quality. Text2Earth excels in zero-shot text2image generation and demonstrates robust generalization and flexibility across multiple tasks, including unbounded scene construction, image editing, and cross-modal image generation. This robust capability surpasses previous models restricted to the basic fixed size and limited scene types. On the previous benchmark dataset, Text2Earth outperforms previous models with an improvement of +26.23 FID and +20.95% Zero-shot Cls-OA metric.Our project page is \url{https://chen-yang-liu.github.io/Text2Earth}