Geophysical Analysis & Survey
MMM-RS: A Multi-modal, Multi-GSD, Multi-scene Remote Sensing Dataset and Benchmark for Text-to-Image Generation
Recently, the diffusion-based generative paradigm has achieved impressive general image generation capabilities with text prompts due to its accurate distribution modeling and stable training process. However, generating diverse remote sensing (RS) images that are tremendously different from general images in terms of scale and perspective remains a formidable challenge due to the lack of a comprehensive remote sensing image generation dataset with various modalities, ground sample distances (GSD), and scenes. In this paper, we propose a Multi-modal, Multi-GSD, Multi-scene Remote Sensing (MMM-RS) dataset and benchmark for text-to-image generation in diverse remote sensing scenarios. Specifically, we first collect nine publicly available RS datasets and conduct standardization for all samples. To bridge RS images to textual semantic information, we utilize a large-scale pretrained vision-language model to automatically output text prompts and perform hand-crafted rectification, resulting in information-rich text-image pairs (including multi-modal images).
VRSBench: A Versatile Vision-Language Benchmark Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding
We introduce a new benchmark designed to advance the development of general-purpose, large-scale vision-language models for remote sensing images. Although several vision-language datasets in remote sensing have been proposed to pursue this goal, existing datasets are typically tailored to single tasks, lack detailed object information, or suffer from inadequate quality control. Exploring these improvement opportunities, we present a Versatile vision-language Benchmark for Remote Sensing image understanding, termed VRSBench. This benchmark comprises 29,614 images, with 29,614 human-verified detailed captions, 52,472 object references, and 123,221 question-answer pairs. We further evaluated state-of-the-art models on this benchmark for three vision-language tasks: image captioning, visual grounding, and visual question answering.
Hyperspectral in situ remote sensing of water surface nitrate in the Fitzroy River estuary, Queensland, Australia, using deep learning
Guo, Yiqing, Cherukuru, Nagur, Lehmann, Eric, Unnithan, S. L. Kesav, Kerrisk, Gemma, Malthus, Tim, Islam, Faisal
Nitrate ($\text{NO}_3^-$) is a form of dissolved inorganic nitrogen derived primarily from anthropogenic sources. The recent increase in river-discharged nitrate poses a major risk for coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) lagoon. Although nitrate is an optically inactive (i.e., colourless) constituent, previous studies have demonstrated there is an indirect, non-causal relationship between water surface nitrate and water-leaving reflectance that is mediated through optically active water quality parameters such as total suspended solids and coloured dissolved organic matter. This work aims to advance our understanding of this relationship with an effort to measure time-series nitrate and simultaneous hyperspectral reflectance at the Fitzroy River estuary, Queensland, Australia. Time-series observations revealed periodic cycles in nitrate loads due to the tidal influence in the estuarine study site. The water surface nitrate loads were predicted from hyperspectral reflectance and water salinity measurements, with hyperspectral reflectance indicating the concentrations of optically active variables and salinity indicating the mixing of river water and seawater proportions. The accuracy assessment of model-predicted nitrate against in-situ measured nitrate values showed that the predicted nitrate values correlated well with the ground-truth data, with an $R^2$ score of 0.86, and an RMSE of 0.03 mg/L. This work demonstrates the feasibility of predicting water surface nitrate from hyperspectral reflectance and salinity measurements.
Object-level Cross-view Geo-localization with Location Enhancement and Multi-Head Cross Attention
Huang, Zheyang, Aryal, Jagannath, Nahavandi, Saeid, Lu, Xuequan, Lim, Chee Peng, Wei, Lei, Zhou, Hailing
--Cross-view geo-localization determines the location of a query image, captured by a drone or ground-based camera, by matching it to a geo-referenced satellite image. While traditional approaches focus on image-level localization, many applications, such as search-and-rescue, infrastructure inspection, and precision delivery, demand object-level accuracy. This enables users to prompt a specific object with a single click on a drone image to retrieve precise geo-tagged information of the object. However, variations in viewpoints, timing, and imaging conditions pose significant challenges, especially when identifying visually similar objects in extensive satellite imagery. T o address these challenges, we propose an Object-level Cross-view Geo-localization Network (OCGNet). It integrates user-specified click locations using Gaussian Kernel Transfer (GKT) to preserve location information throughout the network. This cue is dually embedded into the feature encoder and feature matching blocks, ensuring robust object-specific localization. Additionally, OCGNet incorporates a Location Enhancement (LE) module and a Multi-Head Cross Attention (MHCA) module to adaptively emphasize object-specific features or expand focus to relevant contextual regions when necessary. It also demonstrates few-shot learning capabilities, effectively generalizing from limited examples, making it suitable for diverse applications (https://github.com/ZheyangH/OCGNet).
EMRA-proxy: Enhancing Multi-Class Region Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images with Attention Proxy
Yu, Yichun, Lan, Yuqing, Xing, Zhihuan, Yang, Xiaoyi, Tang, Tingyue, Yu, Dan
High-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) image segmentation is challenging due to complex spatial layouts and diverse object appearances. While CNNs excel at capturing local features, they struggle with long-range dependencies, whereas Transformers can model global context but often neglect local details and are computationally expensive.We propose a novel approach, Region-Aware Proxy Network (RAPNet), which consists of two components: Contextual Region Attention (CRA) and Global Class Refinement (GCR). Unlike traditional methods that rely on grid-based layouts, RAPNet operates at the region level for more flexible segmentation. The CRA module uses a Transformer to capture region-level contextual dependencies, generating a Semantic Region Mask (SRM). The GCR module learns a global class attention map to refine multi-class information, combining the SRM and attention map for accurate segmentation.Experiments on three public datasets show that RAPNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior multi-class segmentation accuracy.
Wildfire spread forecasting with Deep Learning
Anastasiou, Nikolaos, Kondylatos, Spyros, Papoutsis, Ioannis
Accurate prediction of wildfire spread is crucial for effective risk management, emergency response, and strategic resource allocation. In this study, we present a deep learning (DL)-based framework for forecasting the final extent of burned areas, using data available at the time of ignition. We leverage a spatio-temporal dataset that covers the Mediterranean region from 2006 to 2022, incorporating remote sensing data, meteorological observations, vegetation maps, land cover classifications, anthropogenic factors, topography data, and thermal anomalies. To evaluate the influence of temporal context, we conduct an ablation study examining how the inclusion of pre- and post-ignition data affects model performance, benchmarking the temporal-aware DL models against a baseline trained exclusively on ignition-day inputs. Our results indicate that multi-day observational data substantially improve predictive accuracy. Particularly, the best-performing model, incorporating a temporal window of four days before to five days after ignition, improves both the F1 score and the Intersection over Union by almost 5% in comparison to the baseline on the test dataset. We publicly release our dataset and models to enhance research into data-driven approaches for wildfire modeling and response.
Data Augmentation and Resolution Enhancement using GANs and Diffusion Models for Tree Segmentation
Ferreira, Alessandro dos Santos, Ramos, Ana Paula Marques, Junior, José Marcato, Gonçalves, Wesley Nunes
Urban forests play a key role in enhancing environmental quality and supporting biodiversity in cities. Mapping and monitoring these green spaces are crucial for urban planning and conservation, yet accurately detecting trees is challenging due to complex landscapes and the variability in image resolution caused by different satellite sensors or UAV flight altitudes. While deep learning architectures have shown promise in addressing these challenges, their effectiveness remains strongly dependent on the availability of large and manually labeled datasets, which are often expensive and difficult to obtain in sufficient quantity. In this work, we propose a novel pipeline that integrates domain adaptation with GANs and Diffusion models to enhance the quality of low-resolution aerial images. Our proposed pipeline enhances low-resolution imagery while preserving semantic content, enabling effective tree segmentation without requiring large volumes of manually annotated data. Leveraging models such as pix2pix, Real-ESRGAN, Latent Diffusion, and Stable Diffusion, we generate realistic and structurally consistent synthetic samples that expand the training dataset and unify scale across domains. This approach not only improves the robustness of segmentation models across different acquisition conditions but also provides a scalable and replicable solution for remote sensing scenarios with scarce annotation resources. Experimental results demonstrated an improvement of over 50% in IoU for low-resolution images, highlighting the effectiveness of our method compared to traditional pipelines.
Assessing wildfire susceptibility in Iran: Leveraging machine learning for geospatial analysis of climatic and anthropogenic factors
Masoudian, Ehsan, Mirzaei, Ali, Bagheri, Hossein
This study investigates the multifaceted factors influencing wildfire risk in Iran, focusing on the interplay between climatic conditions and human activities. Utilizing advanced remote sensing, geospatial information system (GIS) processing techniques such as cloud computing, and machine learning algorithms, this research analyzed the impact of climatic parameters, topographic features, and human-related factors on wildfire susceptibility assessment and prediction in Iran. Multiple scenarios were developed for this purpose based on the data sampling strategy. The findings revealed that climatic elements such as soil moisture, temperature, and humidity significantly contribute to wildfire susceptibility, while human activities-particularly population density and proximity to powerlines-also played a crucial role. Furthermore, the seasonal impact of each parameter was separately assessed during warm and cold seasons. The results indicated that human-related factors, rather than climatic variables, had a more prominent influence during the seasonal analyses. This research provided new insights into wildfire dynamics in Iran by generating high-resolution wildfire susceptibility maps using advanced machine learning classifiers. The generated maps identified high risk areas, particularly in the central Zagros region, the northeastern Hyrcanian Forest, and the northern Arasbaran forest, highlighting the urgent need for effective fire management strategies.
GeoVLM: Improving Automated Vehicle Geolocalisation Using Vision-Language Matching
Dagda, Barkin, Awais, Muhammad, Fallah, Saber
--Cross-view geo-localisation identifies coarse geographical position of an automated vehicle by matching a ground-level image to a geo-tagged satellite image from a database. Despite the advancements in Cross-view geo-localisation, significant challenges still persist such as similar looking scenes which makes it challenging to find the correct match as the top match. Existing approaches reach high recall rates but they still fail to rank the correct image as the top match. T o address this challenge, this paper proposes GeoVLM, a novel approach which uses the zero-shot capabilities of vision language models to enable cross-view geo-localisation using interpretable cross-view language descriptions. GeoVLM is a trainable reranking approach which improves the best match accuracy of cross-view geo-localisation. GeoVLM is evaluated on standard benchmark VIGOR and University-1652 and also through real-life driving environments using Cross-View United Kingdom, a new benchmark dataset introduced in this paper . The results of the paper show that GeoVLM improves retrieval performance of cross-view geo-localisation compared to the state-of-the-art methods with the help of explainable natural language descriptions. The code is available at https://github.com/CA V-Research-Lab/GeoVLM Index T erms --cross-view geo-localisation, automated vehicles, vision-language models, satellite imagery, interpretable AI, image retrieval. OCALISA TION in automated vehicles refer to the process of finding the precise position and orientation of the automated system or a robot within a given environment relative to a chosen reference coordinate system [1]. Localisation in automated vehicles serves as a backbone for higher-level functions such as perception, planning, and control, ensuring the vehicle can navigate safely and effectively. The most common solution for estimating the geo-position of automated vehicles is Global Positioning System (GPS).
Unlocking Location Intelligence: A Survey from Deep Learning to The LLM Era
Hao, Xixuan, Jiang, Yutian, Zou, Xingchen, Liu, Jiabo, Yin, Yifang, Liang, Yuxuan
Location Intelligence (LI), the science of transforming location-centric geospatial data into actionable knowledge, has become a cornerstone of modern spatial decision-making. The rapid evolution of Geospatial Representation Learning is fundamentally reshaping LI development through two successive technological revolutions: the deep learning breakthrough and the emerging large language model (LLM) paradigm. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in automated feature extraction from structured geospatial data (e.g., satellite imagery, GPS trajectories), the recent integration of LLMs introduces transformative capabilities for cross-modal geospatial reasoning and unstructured geo-textual data processing. This survey presents a comprehensive review of geospatial representation learning across both technological eras, organizing them into a structured taxonomy based on the complete pipeline comprising: (1) data perspective, (2) methodological perspective and (3) application perspective. We also highlight current advancements, discuss existing limitations, and propose potential future research directions in the LLM era. This work offers a thorough exploration of the field and providing a roadmap for further innovation in LI. The summary of the up-to-date paper list can be found in https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/Awesome-Location-Intelligence and will undergo continuous updates.