RSRefSeg: Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation with Foundation Models

Referring remote sensing image segmentation is crucial for achieving fine-grained visual understanding through free-format textual input, enabling enhanced scene and object extraction in remote sensing applications. Current research primarily utilizes pre-trained language models to encode textual descriptions and align them with visual modalities, thereby facilitating the expression of relevant visual features. However, these approaches often struggle to establish robust alignments between fine-grained semantic concepts, leading to inconsistent representations across textual and visual information. To address these limitations, we introduce a referring remote sensing image segmentation foundational model, RSRefSeg. RSRefSeg leverages CLIP for visual and textual encoding, employing both global and local textual semantics as filters to generate referring-related visual activation features in the latent space. These activated features then serve as input prompts for SAM, which refines the segmentation masks through its robust visual generalization capabilities. Experimental results on the RRSIS-D dataset demonstrate that RSRefSeg outperforms existing methods, underscoring the effectiveness of foundational models in enhancing multimodal task comprehension. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/KyanChen/RSRefSeg}.

Text2Earth: Unlocking Text-driven Remote Sensing Image Generation with a Global-Scale Dataset and a Foundation Model

Generative foundation models have advanced large-scale text-driven natural image generation, becoming a prominent research trend across various vertical domains. However, in the remote sensing field, there is still a lack of research on large-scale text-to-image (text2image) generation technology. Existing remote sensing image-text datasets are small in scale and confined to specific geographic areas and scene types. Besides, existing text2image methods have struggled to achieve global-scale, multi-resolution controllable, and unbounded image generation. To address these challenges, this paper presents two key contributions: the Git-10M dataset and the Text2Earth foundation model. Git-10M is a global-scale image-text dataset comprising 10 million image-text pairs, 5 times larger than the previous largest one. The dataset covers a wide range of geographic scenes and contains resolution information, significantly surpassing existing datasets in both size and diversity. Building on Git-10M, we propose Text2Earth, a 1.3 billion parameter generative foundation model based on the diffusion framework to model global-scale remote sensing scenes. Text2Earth integrates a resolution guidance mechanism, enabling users to specify image resolutions. A dynamic condition adaptation strategy is proposed for training and inference to improve image quality. Text2Earth excels in zero-shot text2image generation and demonstrates robust generalization and flexibility across multiple tasks, including unbounded scene construction, image editing, and cross-modal image generation. This robust capability surpasses previous models restricted to the basic fixed size and limited scene types. On the previous benchmark dataset, Text2Earth outperforms previous models with an improvement of +26.23 FID and +20.95% Zero-shot Cls-OA metric.Our project page is \url{https://chen-yang-liu.github.io/Text2Earth}

Efficient Semantic Splatting for Remote Sensing Multi-view Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel semantic splatting approach based on Gaussian Splatting to achieve efficient and low-latency. Our method projects the RGB attributes and semantic features of point clouds onto the image plane, simultaneously rendering RGB images and semantic segmentation results. Leveraging the explicit structure of point clouds and a one-time rendering strategy, our approach significantly enhances efficiency during optimization and rendering. Additionally, we employ SAM2 to generate pseudo-labels for boundary regions, which often lack sufficient supervision, and introduce two-level aggregation losses at the 2D feature map and 3D spatial levels to improve the view-consistent and spatial continuity.

Remote Sensing Temporal Vision-Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Temporal image analysis in remote sensing has traditionally centered on change detection, which identifies regions of change between images captured at different times. However, change detection remains limited by its focus on visual-level interpretation, often lacking contextual or descriptive information. The rise of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has introduced a new dimension to remote sensing temporal image analysis by integrating visual information with natural language, creating an avenue for advanced interpretation of temporal image changes. Remote Sensing Temporal VLMs (RSTVLMs) allow for dynamic interactions, generating descriptive captions, answering questions, and providing a richer semantic understanding of temporal images. This temporal vision-language capability is particularly valuable for complex remote sensing applications, where higher-level insights are crucial. This paper comprehensively reviews the progress of RSTVLM research, with a focus on the latest VLM applications for temporal image analysis. We categorize and discuss core methodologies, datasets, and metrics, highlight recent advances in temporal vision-language tasks, and outline key challenges and future directions for research in this emerging field. This survey fills a critical gap in the literature by providing an integrated overview of RSTVLM, offering a foundation for further advancements in remote sensing temporal image understanding. We will keep tracing related works at \url{https://github.com/Chen-Yang-Liu/Awesome-RS-Temporal-VLM}

MambaDS: Near-Surface Meteorological Field Downscaling with Topography Constrained Selective State Space Modeling

In an era of frequent extreme weather and global warming, obtaining precise, fine-grained near-surface weather forecasts is increasingly essential for human activities. Downscaling (DS), a crucial task in meteorological forecasting, enables the reconstruction of high-resolution meteorological states for target regions from global-scale forecast results. Previous downscaling methods, inspired by CNN and Transformer-based super-resolution models, lacked tailored designs for meteorology and encountered structural limitations. Notably, they failed to efficiently integrate topography, a crucial prior in the downscaling process. In this paper, we address these limitations by pioneering the selective state space model into the meteorological field downscaling and propose a novel model called MambaDS. This model enhances the utilization of multivariable correlations and topography information, unique challenges in the downscaling process while retaining the advantages of Mamba in long-range dependency modeling and linear computational complexity. Through extensive experiments in both China mainland and the continental United States (CONUS), we validated that our proposed MambaDS achieves state-of-the-art results in three different types of meteorological field downscaling settings. We will release the code subsequently.

Open-CD: A Comprehensive Toolbox for Change Detection

We present Open-CD, a change detection toolbox that contains a rich set of change detection methods as well as related components and modules. The toolbox started from a series of open source general vision task tools, including OpenMMLab Toolkits, PyTorch Image Models, etc. It gradually evolves into a unified platform that covers many popular change detection methods and contemporary modules. It not only includes training and inference codes, but also provides some useful scripts for data analysis. We believe this toolbox is by far the most complete change detection toolbox. In this report, we introduce the various features, supported methods and applications of Open-CD. In addition, we also conduct a benchmarking study on different methods and components. We wish that the toolbox and benchmark could serve the growing research community by providing a flexible toolkit to reimplement existing methods and develop their own new change detectors. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/likyoo/open-cd}. Pioneeringly, this report also includes brief descriptions of the algorithms supported in Open-CD, mainly contributed by their authors. We sincerely encourage researchers in this field to participate in this project and work together to create a more open community. This toolkit and report will be kept updated.

A Late-Stage Bitemporal Feature Fusion Network for Semantic Change Detection

Semantic change detection is an important task in geoscience and earth observation. By producing a semantic change map for each temporal phase, both the land use land cover categories and change information can be interpreted. Recently some multi-task learning based semantic change detection methods have been proposed to decompose the task into semantic segmentation and binary change detection subtasks. However, previous works comprise triple branches in an entangled manner, which may not be optimal and hard to adopt foundation models. Besides, lacking explicit refinement of bitemporal features during fusion may cause low accuracy. In this letter, we propose a novel late-stage bitemporal feature fusion network to address the issue. Specifically, we propose local global attentional aggregation module to strengthen feature fusion, and propose local global context enhancement module to highlight pivotal semantics. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two public datasets, including SECOND and Landsat-SCD. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.

CDMamba: Remote Sensing Image Change Detection with Mamba

Recently, the Mamba architecture based on state space models has demonstrated remarkable performance in a series of natural language processing tasks and has been rapidly applied to remote sensing change detection (CD) tasks. However, most methods enhance the global receptive field by directly modifying the scanning mode of Mamba, neglecting the crucial role that local information plays in dense prediction tasks (e.g., CD). In this article, we propose a model called CDMamba, which effectively combines global and local features for handling CD tasks. Specifically, the Scaled Residual ConvMamba (SRCM) block is proposed to utilize the ability of Mamba to extract global features and convolution to enhance the local details, to alleviate the issue that current Mamba-based methods lack detailed clues and are difficult to achieve fine detection in dense prediction tasks. Furthermore, considering the characteristics of bi-temporal feature interaction required for CD, the Adaptive Global Local Guided Fusion (AGLGF) block is proposed to dynamically facilitate the bi-temporal interaction guided by other temporal global/local features. Our intuition is that more discriminative change features can be acquired with the guidance of other temporal features. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our proposed CDMamba outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be open-sourced at https://github.com/zmoka-zht/CDMamba.

Multi-view Remote Sensing Image Segmentation With SAM priors

Multi-view segmentation in Remote Sensing (RS) seeks to segment images from diverse perspectives within a scene. Recent methods leverage 3D information extracted from an Implicit Neural Field (INF), bolstering result consistency across multiple views while using limited accounts of labels (even within 3-5 labels) to streamline labor. Nonetheless, achieving superior performance within the constraints of limited-view labels remains challenging due to inadequate scene-wide supervision and insufficient semantic features within the INF. To address these. we propose to inject the prior of the visual foundation model-Segment Anything(SAM), to the INF to obtain better results under the limited number of training data. Specifically, we contrast SAM features between testing and training views to derive pseudo labels for each testing view, augmenting scene-wide labeling information. Subsequently, we introduce SAM features via a transformer into the INF of the scene, supplementing the semantic information. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the mainstream method, confirming the efficacy of SAM as a supplement to the INF for this task.

MetaEarth: A Generative Foundation Model for Global-Scale Remote Sensing Image Generation

The recent advancement of generative foundational models has ushered in a new era of image generation in the realm of natural images, revolutionizing art design, entertainment, environment simulation, and beyond. Despite producing high-quality samples, existing methods are constrained to generating images of scenes at a limited scale. In this paper, we present MetaEarth, a generative foundation model that breaks the barrier by scaling image generation to a global level, exploring the creation of worldwide, multi-resolution, unbounded, and virtually limitless remote sensing images. In MetaEarth, we propose a resolution-guided self-cascading generative framework, which enables the generating of images at any region with a wide range of geographical resolutions. To achieve unbounded and arbitrary-sized image generation, we design a novel noise sampling strategy for denoising diffusion models by analyzing the generation conditions and initial noise. To train MetaEarth, we construct a large dataset comprising multi-resolution optical remote sensing images with geographical information. Experiments have demonstrated the powerful capabilities of our method in generating global-scale images. Additionally, the MetaEarth serves as a data engine that can provide high-quality and rich training data for downstream tasks. Our model opens up new possibilities for constructing generative world models by simulating Earth visuals from an innovative overhead perspective.