Papers › RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing

RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing

19 Jun 2023arXiv:2306.11029archive 2025-07-28

Fan Liu, Delong Chen, Zhangqingyun Guan, Xiaocong Zhou, Jiale Zhu, Qiaolin Ye, Liyong Fu, Jun Zhou

General-purpose foundation models have led to recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. In remote sensing, self-supervised learning (SSL) and Masked Image Modeling (MIM) have been adopted to build foundation models. However, these models primarily learn low-level features and require annotated data for fine-tuning. Moreover, they are inapplicable for retrieval and zero-shot applications due to the lack of language understanding. To address these limitations, we propose RemoteCLIP, the first vision-language foundation model for remote sensing that aims to learn robust visual features with rich semantics and aligned text embeddings for seamless downstream application. To address the scarcity of pre-training data, we leverage data scaling which converts heterogeneous annotations into a unified image-caption data format based on Box-to-Caption (B2C) and Mask-to-Box (M2B) conversion. By further incorporating UAV imagery, we produce a 12 × larger pretraining dataset than the combination of all available datasets. RemoteCLIP can be applied to a variety of downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification, linear probing, k-NN classification, few-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and object counting in remote sensing images. Evaluation on 16 datasets, including a newly introduced RemoteCount benchmark to test the object counting ability, shows that RemoteCLIP consistently outperforms baseline foundation models across different model scales. Impressively, RemoteCLIP beats the state-of-the-art method by 9.14% mean recall on the RSITMD dataset and 8.92% on the RSICD dataset. For zero-shot classification, our RemoteCLIP outperforms the CLIP baseline by up to 6.39% average accuracy on 12 downstream datasets. Project website: https://github.com/ChenDelong1999/RemoteCLIP

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Code

chendelong1999/remoteclip officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

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Tasks

ClassificationCross-Modal RetrievalImage ClassificationImage-text RetrievalObject CountingRetrievalSelf-Supervised LearningText RetrievalZero-Shot Image ClassificationZero-Shot Learningimage-classification

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Cross-Modal Retrieval RSICD RemoteCLIP Image-to-text R@1 18.39% #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Modal Retrieval RSICD RemoteCLIP Mean Recall 36.35% #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Modal Retrieval RSICD RemoteCLIP text-to-image R@1 14.73% #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Modal Retrieval RSITMD RemoteCLIP Image-to-text R@1 28.76% #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Modal Retrieval RSITMD RemoteCLIP Mean Recall 50.52% #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Modal Retrieval RSITMD RemoteCLIP text-to-imageR@1 23.76% #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

CLIPk-NN

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