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SkySense: A Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Foundation Model Towards Universal Interpretation for Earth Observation Imagery

15 Dec 2023CVPR 2024 1arXiv:2312.10115archive 2025-07-28

Xin Guo, Jiangwei Lao, Bo Dang, Yingying Zhang, Lei Yu, Lixiang Ru, Liheng Zhong, Ziyuan Huang, Kang Wu, Dingxiang Hu, Huimei He, Jian Wang, Jingdong Chen, Ming Yang, Yongjun Zhang, Yansheng Li

Prior studies on Remote Sensing Foundation Model (RSFM) reveal immense potential towards a generic model for Earth Observation. Nevertheless, these works primarily focus on a single modality without temporal and geo-context modeling, hampering their capabilities for diverse tasks. In this study, we present SkySense, a generic billion-scale model, pre-trained on a curated multi-modal Remote Sensing Imagery (RSI) dataset with 21.5 million temporal sequences. SkySense incorporates a factorized multi-modal spatiotemporal encoder taking temporal sequences of optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data as input. This encoder is pre-trained by our proposed Multi-Granularity Contrastive Learning to learn representations across different modal and spatial granularities. To further enhance the RSI representations by the geo-context clue, we introduce Geo-Context Prototype Learning to learn region-aware prototypes upon RSI's multi-modal spatiotemporal features. To our best knowledge, SkySense is the largest Multi-Modal RSFM to date, whose modules can be flexibly combined or used individually to accommodate various tasks. It demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities on a thorough evaluation encompassing 16 datasets over 7 tasks, from single- to multi-modal, static to temporal, and classification to localization. SkySense surpasses 18 recent RSFMs in all test scenarios. Specifically, it outperforms the latest models such as GFM, SatLas and Scale-MAE by a large margin, i.e., 2.76%, 3.67% and 3.61% on average respectively. We will release the pre-trained weights to facilitate future research and Earth Observation applications.

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Tasks

Contrastive LearningEarth ObservationImage ClassificationOpen Vocabulary Semantic SegmentationTemporal SequencesVisual Question AnsweringZero-shot Classification (unified classes)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification RESISC45 SkySense-O zero-shot Acc 83.28 #20 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation FAST SkySense-O mIoU 8.3 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation ISPRS Potsdam SkySense-O mIoU 54.1 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation SIOR SkySense-O mIoU 30.89 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation SOTA SkySense-O mIoU 32.12 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation iSAID SkySense-O mIoU- 43.9 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering AID-VQA SkySense-O Acc. (test) 94.10 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering RSVQA-HR SkySense-O zero-shot Acc 78.09 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering SIRI-WHU SkySense-O Acc. (test) 74.79 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Contrastive LearningFocus

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