The Landsat program offers over 50 years of globally consistent Earth imagery. However, the lack of benchmarks for this data constrains progress towards Landsat-based Geospatial Foundation Models (GFM). In this paper, we introduce Landsat-Bench, a suite of three benchmarks with Landsat imagery that adapt from existing remote sensing datasets -- EuroSAT-L, BigEarthNet-L, and LC100-L. We establish baseline and standardized evaluation methods across both common architectures and Landsat foundation models pretrained on the SSL4EO-L dataset. Notably, we provide evidence that SSL4EO-L pretrained GFMs extract better representations for downstream tasks in comparison to ImageNet, including performance gains of +4% OA and +5.1% mAP on EuroSAT-L and BigEarthNet-L.

Most post-disaster damage classifiers succeed only when destructive forces leave clear spectral or structural signatures -- conditions rarely present after inundation. Consequently, existing models perform poorly at identifying flood-related building damages. The model presented in this study, Flood-DamageSense, addresses this gap as the first deep-learning framework purpose-built for building-level flood-damage assessment. The architecture fuses pre- and post-event SAR/InSAR scenes with very-high-resolution optical basemaps and an inherent flood-risk layer that encodes long-term exposure probabilities, guiding the network toward plausibly affected structures even when compositional change is minimal. A multimodal Mamba backbone with a semi-Siamese encoder and task-specific decoders jointly predicts (1) graded building-damage states, (2) floodwater extent, and (3) building footprints. Training and evaluation on Hurricane Harvey (2017) imagery from Harris County, Texas -- supported by insurance-derived property-damage extents -- show a mean F1 improvement of up to 19 percentage points over state-of-the-art baselines, with the largest gains in the frequently misclassified "minor" and "moderate" damage categories. Ablation studies identify the inherent-risk feature as the single most significant contributor to this performance boost. An end-to-end post-processing pipeline converts pixel-level outputs to actionable, building-scale damage maps within minutes of image acquisition. By combining risk-aware modeling with SAR's all-weather capability, Flood-DamageSense delivers faster, finer-grained, and more reliable flood-damage intelligence to support post-disaster decision-making and resource allocation.

Olive production is an important tree crop in Mediterranean climates. However, olive yield varies significantly due to climate change. Accurately estimating yield using remote sensing and machine learning remains a complex challenge. In this study, we developed a streamlined pipeline for olive yield estimation in the Kairouan and Sousse governorates of Tunisia. We extracted features from multispectral reflectance bands, vegetation indices derived from Landsat-8 OLI and Landsat-9 OLI-2 satellite imagery, along with digital elevation model data. These spatial features were combined with ground-based field survey data to form a structured tabular dataset. We then developed an automated ensemble learning framework, implemented using AutoGluon to train and evaluate multiple machine learning models, select optimal combinations through stacking, and generate robust yield predictions using five-fold cross-validation. The results demonstrate strong predictive performance from both sensors, with Landsat-8 OLI achieving R2 = 0.8635 and RMSE = 1.17 tons per ha, and Landsat-9 OLI-2 achieving R2 = 0.8378 and RMSE = 1.32 tons per ha. This study highlights a scalable, cost-effective, and accurate method for olive yield estimation, with potential applicability across diverse agricultural regions globally.

New UAV technologies and the NewSpace era are transforming Earth Observation missions and data acquisition. Numerous small platforms generate large data volume, straining bandwidth and requiring onboard decision-making to transmit high-quality information in time. While Machine Learning allows real-time autonomous processing, FPGAs balance performance with adaptability to mission-specific requirements, enabling onboard deployment. This review systematically analyzes 66 experiments deploying ML models on FPGAs for Remote Sensing applications. We introduce two distinct taxonomies to capture both efficient model architectures and FPGA implementation strategies. For transparency and reproducibility, we follow PRISMA 2020 guidelines and share all data and code at https://github.com/CedricLeon/Survey_RS-ML-FPGA.

Accurate house-price forecasting is essential for investors, planners, and researchers. However, reproducible benchmarks with sufficient spatiotemporal depth and contextual richness for long horizon prediction remain scarce. To address this, we introduce HouseTS a large scale, multimodal dataset covering monthly house prices from March 2012 to December 2023 across 6,000 ZIP codes in 30 major U.S. metropolitan areas. The dataset includes over 890K records, enriched with points of Interest (POI), socioeconomic indicators, and detailed real estate metrics. To establish standardized performance baselines, we evaluate 14 models, spanning classical statistical approaches, deep neural networks (DNNs), and pretrained time-series foundation models. We further demonstrate the value of HouseTS in a multimodal case study, where a vision language model extracts structured textual descriptions of geographic change from time stamped satellite imagery. This enables interpretable, grounded insights into urban evolution. HouseTS is hosted on Kaggle, while all preprocessing pipelines, benchmark code, and documentation are openly maintained on GitHub to ensure full reproducibility and easy adoption.

Classifying geospatial imagery remains a major bottleneck for applications such as disaster response and land-use monitoring-particularly in regions where annotated data is scarce or unavailable. Existing tools (e.g., RS-CLIP) that claim zero-shot classification capabilities for satellite imagery nonetheless rely on task-specific pretraining and adaptation to reach competitive performance. We introduce GeoVision Labeler (GVL), a strictly zero-shot classification framework: a vision Large Language Model (vLLM) generates rich, human-readable image descriptions, which are then mapped to user-defined classes by a conventional Large Language Model (LLM). This modular, and interpretable pipeline enables flexible image classification for a large range of use cases. We evaluated GVL across three benchmarks-SpaceNet v7, UC Merced, and RESISC45. It achieves up to 93.2% zero-shot accuracy on the binary Buildings vs. No Buildings task on SpaceNet v7. For complex multi-class classification tasks (UC Merced, RESISC45), we implemented a recursive LLM-driven clustering to form meta-classes at successive depths, followed by hierarchical classification-first resolving coarse groups, then finer distinctions-to deliver competitive zero-shot performance. GVL is open-sourced at https://github.com/microsoft/geo-vision-labeler to catalyze adoption in real-world geospatial workflows.

Land cover and land use (LULC) changes are key applications of satellite imagery, and they have critical roles in resource management, urbanization, protection of soils and the environment, and enhancing sustainable development. The literature has heavily utilized multispectral spatiotemporal satellite data alongside advanced machine learning algorithms to monitor and predict LULC changes. This study analyzes and compares LULC changes across various governorates (provinces) of the Sultanate of Oman from 2016 to 2021 using annual time steps. For the chosen region, multispectral spatiotemporal data were acquired from the open-source Sentinel-2 satellite dataset. Supervised machine learning algorithms were used to train and classify different land covers, such as water bodies, crops, urban, etc. The constructed model was subsequently applied within the study region, allowing for an effective comparative evaluation of LULC changes within the given timeframe.

Detecting vehicles in satellite images is crucial for traffic management, urban planning, and disaster response. However, current models struggle with real-world diversity, particularly across different regions. This challenge is amplified by geographic bias in existing datasets, which often focus on specific areas and overlook regions like the Middle East. To address this gap, we present the Vehicles in the Middle East (VME) dataset, designed explicitly for vehicle detection in high-resolution satellite images from Middle Eastern countries. Sourced from Maxar, the VME dataset spans 54 cities across 12 countries, comprising over 4,000 image tiles and more than 100,000 vehicles, annotated using both manual and semi-automated methods. Additionally, we introduce the largest benchmark dataset for Car Detection in Satellite Imagery (CDSI), combining images from multiple sources to enhance global car detection. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on existing datasets perform poorly on Middle Eastern images, while the VME dataset significantly improves detection accuracy in this region. Moreover, state-of-the-art models trained on CDSI achieve substantial improvements in global car detection.

Remote sensing (RS) imagery, which requires specialized satellites to collect and is difficult to annotate, suffers from data scarcity and class imbalance in certain spectrums. Due to their data scarcity, training large-scale RS models from scratch is unrealistic, and the alternative is to transfer pre-trained models by fine-tuning or a more data-efficient method LoRA. Due to class imbalance, transferred models exhibit strong bias, where features of the major class dominate over those of the minor class. In this paper, we propose debLoRA, a generic training approach that works with any LoRA variants to yield debiased features. It is an unsupervised learning approach that can diversify minor class features based on the shared attributes with major classes, where the attributes are obtained by a simple step of clustering.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and satellites are key data sources for precision agriculture, yet each presents trade-offs. Satellite data offer broad spatial, temporal, and spectral coverage but lack the resolution needed for many precision farming applications, while UAS provide high spatial detail but are limited by coverage and cost, especially for hyperspectral data. This study presents a novel framework that fuses satellite and UAS imagery using super-resolution methods. By integrating data across spatial, spectral, and temporal domains, we leverage the strengths of both platforms cost-effectively. We use estimation of cover crop biomass and nitrogen (N) as a case study to evaluate our approach. By spectrally extending UAS RGB data to the vegetation red edge and near-infrared regions, we generate high-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery and improve biomass and N estimation accuracy by 18% and 31%, respectively. Our results show that UAS data need only be collected from a subset of fields and time points. Farmers can then 1) enhance the spectral detail of UAS RGB imagery; 2) increase the spatial resolution by using satellite data; and 3) extend these enhancements spatially and across the growing season at the frequency of the satellite flights. Our SRCNN-based spectral extension model shows considerable promise for model transferability over other cropping systems in the Upper and Lower Chesapeake Bay regions. Additionally, it remains effective even when cloud-free satellite data are unavailable, relying solely on the UAS RGB input. The spatial extension model produces better biomass and N predictions than models built on raw UAS RGB images. Once trained with targeted UAS RGB data, the spatial extension model allows farmers to stop repeated UAS flights. While we introduce super-resolution advances, the core contribution is a lightweight and scalable system for affordable on-farm use.