Remote Sensing SpatioTemporal Vision-Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
Department of Aerospace Intelligent Science and Technology, School of Astronautics, Beihang University（航空航天智能科学与技术系，航天学院，北航）；Key Laboratory of Spacecraft Design Optimization and Dynamic Simulation Technologies, Ministry of Education, China（航天器设计优化与动态仿真技术重点实验室，教育部，中国）；College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University（计算机科学学院，内蒙古大学）；Shen Yuan Honors College of Beihang University（盛元荣誉学院，北航）
Chenyang Liu, Jiafan Zhang, Keyan Chen, Man Wang, Zhengxia Zou, Zhenwei Shi
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Published in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine
The interpretation of multi-temporal remote sensing imagery is critical for monitoring Earth's dynamic processes-yet previous change detection methods, which produce binary or semantic masks, fall short of providing human-readable insights into changes. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have opened a new frontier by fusing visual and linguistic modalities, enabling spatio-temporal vision-language understanding: models that not only capture spatial and temporal dependencies to recognize changes but also provide a richer interactive semantic analysis of temporal images (e.g., generate descriptive captions and answer natural-language queries). In this survey, we present the first comprehensive review of RS-STVLMs. The survey covers the evolution of models from early task-specific models to recent general foundation models that leverage powerful large language models. We discuss progress in representative tasks, such as change captioning, change question answering, and change grounding. Moreover, we systematically dissect the fundamental components and key technologies underlying these models, and review the datasets and evaluation metrics that have driven the field. By synthesizing task-level insights with a deep dive into shared architectural patterns, we aim to illuminate current achievements and chart promising directions for future research in spatio-temporal vision-language understanding for remote sensing. We will keep tracing related works at https://github.com/Chen-Yang-Liu/Awesome-RS-SpatioTemporal-VLMs
This paper introduces the task of visual question answering for remote sensing data (RSVQA). Remote sensing images contain a wealth of information which can be useful for a wide range of tasks including land cover classification, object counting or detection. However, most of the available methodologies are task-specific, thus inhibiting generic and easy access to the information contained in remote sensing data. As a consequence, accurate remote sensing product generation still requires expert knowledge. With RSVQA, we propose a system to extract information from remote sensing data that is a…
Remote Sensing Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Bridging Remote Sensing Imagery and Comprehensive Knowledge with a Multi-Modal Dataset and Retrieval-Augmented Generation Model
School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（信息科学技术学院，中国科学技术大学）；China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology（电子信息技术研究院）
SEMT: Static-Expansion-Mesh Transformer Network Architecture for Remote Sensing Image Captioning
Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究院）；University of Technology of Troyes（图卢兹技术大学）；Ho Chi Minh University of Technology（胡志明技术大学）；Ton Duc Thang University（-ton Duc Thang大学）
Remote sensing images and techniques are powerful tools to investigate earth surface. Data quality is the key to enhance remote sensing applications and obtaining a clear and noise-free set of data is very difficult in most situations due to the varying acquisition (e.g., atmosphere and season), sensor, and platform (e.g., satellite angles and sensor characteristics) conditions. With the increasing development of satellites, nowadays Terabytes of remote sensing images can be acquired every day. Therefore, information and data fusion can be particularly important in the remote sensing community…
Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院西安光机精密机械研究所）；The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Inspired by recent development of artificial satellite, remote sensing images have attracted extensive attention. Recently, noticeable progress has been made in scene classification and target detection.However, it is still not clear how to describe the remote sensing image content with accurate and concise sentences. In this paper, we investigate to describe the remote sensing images with accurate and flexible sentences. First, some annotated instructions are presented to better describe the remote sensing images considering the special characteristics of remote sensing images. Second, in ord…
The past few decades have witnessed the great progress of unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) in civilian fields, especially in photogrammetry and remote sensing. In contrast with the platforms of manned aircraft and satellite, the UAV platform holds many promising characteristics: flexibility, efficiency, high-spatial/temporal resolution, low cost, easy operation, etc., which make it an effective complement to other remote-sensing platforms and a cost-effective means for remote sensing. Considering the popularity and expansion of UAV-based remote sensing in recent years, this paper provides a s…
Several remote sensing software packages are used to the explicit purpose of analyzing and visualizing remotely sensed data, with the developing of remote sensing sensor technologies from last ten years. Accord-ing to literature, the remote sensing is still the lack of software tools for effective information extraction from remote sensing data. So, this paper provides a state-of-art of multi-sensor image fusion technologies as well as review on the quality evaluation of the single image or fused images in the commercial remote sensing pack-ages. It also introduces program (ALwassaiProcess) de…
Given the importance of remote sensing, surprisingly little attention has been paid to it by the representation learning community. To address it and to establish baselines and a common evaluation protocol in this domain, we provide simplified access to 5 diverse remote sensing datasets in a standardized form. Specifically, we investigate in-domain representation learning to develop generic remote sensing representations and explore which characteristics are important for a dataset to be a good source for remote sensing representation learning. The established baselines achieve state-of-the-ar…
Recent advances in supervised deep learning methods are enabling remote measurements of photoplethysmography-based physiological signals using facial videos. The performance of these supervised methods, however, are dependent on the availability of large labelled data. Contrastive learning as a self-supervised method has recently achieved state-of-the-art performances in learning representative data features by maximising mutual information between different augmented views. However, existing data augmentation techniques for contrastive learning are not designed to learn physiological signals …
Research & Development Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shenzhen（西北工业大学深圳研究院）；School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学自动化学院）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）
Remote sensing image scene classification, which aims at labeling remote sensing images with a set of semantic categories based on their contents, has broad applications in a range of fields. Propelled by the powerful feature learning capabilities of deep neural networks, remote sensing image scene classification driven by deep learning has drawn remarkable attention and achieved significant breakthroughs. However, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive review of recent achievements regarding deep learning for scene classification of remote sensing images is still lacking. Considering t…
Generic Knowledge Boosted Pre-training For Remote Sensing Images
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）；School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University（北京大学软件与微电子学院）
MBZ University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Deep learning-based algorithms have seen a massive popularity in different areas of remote sensing image analysis over the past decade. Recently, transformers-based architectures, originally introduced in natural language processing, have pervaded computer vision field where the self-attention mechanism has been utilized as a replacement to the popular convolution operator for capturing long-range dependencies. Inspired by recent advances in computer vision, remote sensing community has also witnessed an increased exploration of vision transformers for a diverse set of tasks. Although a number…
With the development of remote sensing technology, the acquisition of remote sensing images is easier and easier, which provides sufficient data resources for the task of detecting remote sensing objects. However, how to detect objects quickly and accurately from many complex optical remote sensing images is a challenging hot issue. In this paper, we propose an efficient anchor free object detector, CenterFPANet. To pursue speed, we use a lightweight backbone and introduce the asymmetric revolution block. To improve the accuracy, we designed the FPA module, which links the feature maps of diff…
Element AI；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）
Remote sensing and automatic earth monitoring are key to solve global-scale challenges such as disaster prevention, land use monitoring, or tackling climate change. Although there exist vast amounts of remote sensing data, most of it remains unlabeled and thus inaccessible for supervised learning algorithms. Transfer learning approaches can reduce the data requirements of deep learning algorithms. However, most of these methods are pre-trained on ImageNet and their generalization to remote sensing imagery is not guaranteed due to the domain gap. In this work, we propose Seasonal Contrast (SeCo…
Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院电子学研究所）
Cloud-based overlays are often present in optical remote sensing images, thus limiting the application of acquired data. Removing clouds is an indispensable pre-processing step in remote sensing image analysis. Deep learning has achieved great success in the field of remote sensing in recent years, including scene classification and change detection. However, deep learning is rarely applied in remote sensing image removal clouds. The reason is the lack of data sets for training neural networks. In order to solve this problem, this paper first proposed the Remote sensing Image Cloud rEmoving da…
Entropy is the measure of uncertainty in any data and is adopted for maximisation of mutual information in many remote sensing operations. The availability of wide entropy variations motivated us for an investigation over the suitability preference of these versions to specific operations.
The proliferation of remote sensing satellites has resulted in a massive amount of remote sensing images. However, due to human and material resource constraints, the vast majority of remote sensing images remain unlabeled. As a result, it cannot be applied to currently available deep learning methods. To fully utilize the remaining unlabeled images, we propose a Geographical Knowledge-driven Representation learning method for remote sensing images (GeoKR), improving network performance and reduce the demand for annotated data. The global land cover products and geographical location associate…
Remote sensing semantic segmentation aims to assign automatically each pixel on aerial images with specific label. In this letter, we proposed a new module, called improved-flow warp module (IFWM), to adjust semantic feature maps across different scales for remote sensing semantic segmentation. The improved-flow warp module is applied along with the feature extraction process in the convolutional neural network. First, IFWM computes the offsets of pixels by a learnable way, which can alleviate the misalignment of the multi-scale features. Second, the offsets help with the low-resolution deep f…
Thanks to recent advances in CNNs, solid improvements have been made in semantic segmentation of high resolution remote sensing imagery. However, most of the previous works have not fully taken into account the specific difficulties that exist in remote sensing tasks. One of such difficulties is that objects are small and crowded in remote sensing imagery. To tackle with this challenging task we have proposed a novel architecture called local feature extraction (LFE) module attached on top of dilated front-end module. The LFE module is based on our findings that aggressively increasing dilatio…
In recent years, supervised learning has been widely used in various tasks of optical remote sensing image understanding, including remote sensing image classification, pixel-wise segmentation, change detection, and object detection. The methods based on supervised learning need a large amount of high-quality training data and their performance highly depends on the quality of the labels. However, in practical remote sensing applications, it is often expensive and time-consuming to obtain large-scale data sets with high-quality labels, which leads to a lack of sufficient supervised information…
Deep learning techniques are becoming increasingly important to solve a number of image processing tasks. Among common algorithms, Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks based systems achieve state of the art results on satellite and aerial imagery in many applications. While these approaches are subject to scientific interest, there is currently no operational and generic implementation available at user-level for the remote sensing community. In this paper, we presents a framework enabling the use of deep learning techniques with remote sensing images and geospatial data…
A Decade of Deep Learning for Remote Sensing Spatiotemporal Fusion: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities
School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan)（中国地质大学（武汉）计算机科学学院）；Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院航空航天信息研究所）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子电气与通信工程学院）
We explore the use of convolutional neural networks for the semantic classification of remote sensing scenes. Two recently proposed architectures, CaffeNet and GoogLeNet, are adopted, with three different learning modalities. Besides conventional training from scratch, we resort to pre-trained networks that are only fine-tuned on the target data, so as to avoid overfitting problems and reduce design time. Experiments on two remote sensing datasets, with markedly different characteristics, testify on the effectiveness and wide applicability of the proposed solution, which guarantees a significa…
In recent years self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising candidate for unsupervised representation learning. In the visual domain its applications are mostly studied in the context of images of natural scenes. However, its applicability is especially interesting in specific areas, like remote sensing and medicine, where it is hard to obtain huge amounts of labeled data. In this work, we conduct an extensive analysis of the applicability of self-supervised learning in remote sensing image classification. We analyze the influence of the number and domain of images used for self-superv…
Deep learning models for image classification are typically trained under the "closed-world" assumption with a predefined set of image classes. However, when the models are deployed they may be faced with input images not belonging to the classes encountered during training. This type of scenario is common in remote sensing image classification where images come from different geographic areas, sensors, and imaging conditions. In this paper we deal with the problem of detecting remote sensing images coming from a different distribution compared to the training data - out of distribution images…
RS3DBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for 3D Spatial Perception in Remote Sensing
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Software College of Zhejiang University（浙江大学软件学院）；Hangzhou City University（杭州市大学）
Entropy is the measure of uncertainty in any data and is adopted for maximisation of mutual information in many remote sensing operations. The availability of wide entropy variations motivated us for an investigation over the suitability preference of these versions to specific operations. Methodologies were implemented in Matlab and were enhanced with entropy variations. Evaluation of various implementations was based on different statistical parameters with reference to the study area The popular available versions like Tsalli's, Shanon's, and Renyi's entropies were analysed in context of va…
Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF), German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR）遥感技术研究所（IMF））；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学（TUM））
In deep learning research, self-supervised learning (SSL) has received great attention triggering interest within both the computer vision and remote sensing communities. While there has been a big success in computer vision, most of the potential of SSL in the domain of earth observation remains locked. In this paper, we provide an introduction to, and a review of the concepts and latest developments in SSL for computer vision in the context of remote sensing. Further, we provide a preliminary benchmark of modern SSL algorithms on popular remote sensing datasets, verifying the potential of SS…
Govt. Arts College, Melur（梅卢尔政府艺术学院）；Sri Meenakshi Govt. Arts College for Women, Madurai（马杜赖斯里米纳克希政府女子艺术学院）
Remote sensing image classification can be performed in many different ways to extract meaningful features. One common approach is to perform edge detection. A second approach is to try and detect whole shapes, given the fact that these shapes usually tend to have distinctive properties such as object foreground or background. To get optimal results, these two approaches can be combined. This paper adopts a combinatorial optimization method to adaptively select threshold based features to improve remote sensing image. Feature selection is an important combinatorial optimization problem in the …
RS-YOLOX: A High Precision Detector for Object Detection in Satellite Remote Sensing Images
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University（云南大学信息科学与工程学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Computing（云南省智能系统与计算重点实验室）
Recent research on remote sensing object detection has largely focused on improving the representation of oriented bounding boxes but has overlooked the unique prior knowledge presented in remote sensing scenarios. Such prior knowledge can be useful because tiny remote sensing objects may be mistakenly detected without referencing a sufficiently long-range context, and the long-range context required by different types of objects can vary. In this paper, we take these priors into account and propose the Large Selective Kernel Network (LSKNet). LSKNet can dynamically adjust its large spatial re…
ChangeBridge: Spatiotemporal Image Generation with Multimodal Controls for Remote Sensing
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University（武汉大学测绘遥感信息工程国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）；Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo（东京大学新领域创成科学研究科）；Department of Computer Science, Stanford University（斯坦福大学计算机科学系）
