CrossEarth: Geospatial Vision Foundation Model for Domain Generalizable Remote Sensing Semantic SegmentationShow others and affiliations
2026 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, ISSN 0162-8828, E-ISSN 1939-3539Article in journal (Refereed) Epub ahead of print
Abstract [en]
Due to the substantial domain gaps in Remote Sensing (RS) images that are characterized by variabilities such as location, wavelength, and sensor type, Remote Sensing Domain Generalization (RSDG) has emerged as a critical and valuable research frontier, focusing on developing models that generalize effectively across diverse scenarios. However, research in this area remains underexplored: (1) Current cross-domain methods primarily focus on Domain Adaptation (DA), which adapts models to predefined domains rather than to unseen ones; (2) Few studies target the RSDG issue, especially for semantic segmentation tasks. Existing related models are developed for specific unknown domains, struggling with issues of underfitting on other unseen scenarios; (3) Existing RS foundation models tend to prioritize in-domain performance over cross-domain generalization. To this end, we introduce the first vision foundation model for RSDG semantic segmentation, CrossEarth. CrossEarth demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization through a specially designed data-level Earth-Style Injection pipeline and a model-level Multi-Task Training pipeline. In addition, for the semantic segmentation task, we have curated an RSDG benchmark comprising 32 semantic segmentation scenarios across various regions, spectral bands, platforms, and climates, providing comprehensive evaluations of the generalizability of future RSDG models. Extensive experiments on this collection demonstrate the superiority of CrossEarth over existing state-of-the-art methods.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2026.
Keywords [en]
Domain generalization, masked image modeling, remote sensing, semantic segmentation, vision foundation model
National Category
Computer Sciences Computer graphics and computer vision
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-375757DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2025.3649001PubMedID: 41460898Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105026375219OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-375757DiVA, id: diva2:2030890
Note
QC 20260121
2026-01-212026-01-212026-01-21Bibliographically approved