AI Foundation Models in Remote Sensing: A Survey

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have profoundly transformed the field of remote sensing, revolutionizing data collection, processing, and analysis. Traditionally reliant on manual interpretation and task-specific models, remote sensing has been significantly enhanced by the advent of foundation models--large-scale, pre-trained AI models capable of performing a wide array of tasks with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of foundation models in the remote sensing domain, covering models released between June 2021 and June 2024. We categorize these models based on their applications in computer vision and domain-specific tasks, offering insights into their architectures, pre-training datasets, and methodologies. Through detailed performance comparisons, we highlight emerging trends and the significant advancements achieved by these foundation models. Additionally, we discuss the technical challenges, practical implications, and future research directions, addressing the need for high-quality data, computational resources, and improved model generalization. Our research also finds that pre-training methods, particularly self-supervised learning techniques like contrastive learning and masked autoencoders, significantly enhance the performance and robustness of foundation models in remote sensing tasks such as scene classification, object detection, and other applications. This survey aims to serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners by providing a panorama of advances and promising pathways for continued development and application of foundation models in remote sensing.