Towards a satellite image manipulation and deepfake localization benchmark dataset

Verifying the authenticity of satellite imagery has become increasingly critical given advances in generative artificial intelligence. Highly realistic synthetic imagery produced for malicious purposes (deepfakes) can have major consequences in the remote sensing domain, where this data is a fundamental source of information for science applications, planning, logistics, and monitoring. The remote sensing community lacks high-quality, fine-grained manipulation datasets suitable for training and evaluating detection and image forensics algorithms. Existing datasets are lacking and those that do exist either provide no ground truth masks for evaluating manipulation localization, or consist of entire images generated by GANs or diffusion models, which are inadequate for measuring localization performance. To address this gap, we describe a preliminary dataset construction process and prototype benchmark dataset for satellite image manipulation detection and localization. The dataset contains 60 images total, with 30 images carefully manipulated using three manipulation types including copy-paste splicing and diffusion model inpainting, and 30 authentic images. Each image is accompanied by a ground-truth mask and acquisition metadata, enabling both pixel-level localization metrics, image metadata studies, and analyses of how manipulation detection performance relates to image collection parameters. We describe the dataset construction process and present this initial release to support further research in image forensics and geospatial deepfake detection. The prototype dataset can be downloaded at https://huggingface.co/datasets/geodf/fmow-fake-small.

Emerging Flexible Designs for Geospatial Multimodal Foundation Models

Foundation models are rapidly transforming Earth observation by enabling scalable pretraining across diverse unlabeled geospatial modalities. However, their architectural diversity ranging from encoder-only to encoder-decoder and masked autoencoding paradigms makes it challenging to assess performance trade offs in a consistent manner. In this work, we present an apples-to-apples comparison of leading FM architectures designed for geospatial multimodal reasoning, with a particular focus on flexibility across varied spectral band configurations. We standardize pretraining using identical self supervised learning objectives and training datasets, and evaluate all models under consistent parameterization on the GEOBench benchmark across classification and segmentation tasks. Our results offer new insights into the design trade-offs between model flexibility, modality alignment, and downstream task performance. By highlighting architectural strengths and limitations under controlled conditions, this study provides practical guidance for building next generation geospatial foundation models capable of robust multimodal reasoning.

OReole-FM: successes and challenges toward billion-parameter foundation models for high-resolution satellite imagery

While the pretraining of Foundation Models (FMs) for remote sensing (RS) imagery is on the rise, models remain restricted to a few hundred million parameters. Scaling models to billions of parameters has been shown to yield unprecedented benefits including emergent abilities, but requires data scaling and computing resources typically not available outside industry R&D labs. In this work, we pair high-performance computing resources including Frontier supercomputer, America's first exascale system, and high-resolution optical RS data to pretrain billion-scale FMs. Our study assesses performance of different pretrained variants of vision Transformers across image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection benchmarks, which highlight the importance of data scaling for effective model scaling. Moreover, we discuss construction of a novel TIU pretraining dataset, model initialization, with data and pretrained models intended for public release. By discussing technical challenges and details often lacking in the related literature, this work is intended to offer best practices to the geospatial community toward efficient training and benchmarking of larger FMs.