Papers › Self-supervised Vision Transformers for Joint SAR-optical Representation Learning

Self-supervised Vision Transformers for Joint SAR-optical Representation Learning

11 Apr 2022arXiv:2204.05381archive 2025-07-28

Yi Wang, Conrad M Albrecht, Xiao Xiang Zhu

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has attracted much interest in remote sensing and earth observation due to its ability to learn task-agnostic representations without human annotation. While most of the existing SSL works in remote sensing utilize ConvNet backbones and focus on a single modality, we explore the potential of vision transformers (ViTs) for joint SAR-optical representation learning. Based on DINO, a state-of-the-art SSL algorithm that distills knowledge from two augmented views of an input image, we combine SAR and optical imagery by concatenating all channels to a unified input. Subsequently, we randomly mask out channels of one modality as a data augmentation strategy. While training, the model gets fed optical-only, SAR-only, and SAR-optical image pairs learning both inner- and intra-modality representations. Experimental results employing the BigEarthNet-MM dataset demonstrate the benefits of both, the ViT backbones and the proposed multimodal SSL algorithm DINO-MM.

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zhu-xlab/dino-mm officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
zhu-xlab/ssl4eo-review mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Data AugmentationEarth ObservationRepresentation LearningSelf-Supervised Learning

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Introduced by this paper: Sensor Dropout

AttentionDense ConnectionsLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSensor DropoutSoftmaxVision Transformer

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