Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Model

Large-scale vision foundation models have made significant progress in visual tasks on natural images, where the vision transformers are the primary choice for their good scalability and representation ability. However, the utilization of large models in the remote sensing (RS) community remains under-explored where existing models are still at small-scale, which limits the performance. In this paper, we resort to plain vision transformers with about 100 million parameters and make the first attempt to propose large vision models customized for RS tasks and explore how such large models perform. Specifically, to handle the large image size and objects of various orientations in RS images, we propose a new rotated varied-size window attention to substitute the original full attention in transformers, which could significantly reduce the computational cost and memory footprint while learn better object representation by extracting rich context from the generated diverse windows. Experiments on detection tasks demonstrate the superiority of our model over all state-of-the-art models, achieving 81.16% mAP on the DOTA-V1.0 dataset. The results of our models on downstream classification and segmentation tasks also demonstrate competitive performance compared with the existing advanced methods. Further experiments show the advantages of our models on computational complexity and few-shot learning.