Jordan M. Nieusma

Siqi Lu, Junlin Guo, James R Zimmer-Dauphinee et al.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have profoundly transformed the field of remote sensing, revolutionizing data collection, processing, and analysis. Traditionally reliant on manual interpretation and task-specific models, remote sensing research has been significantly enhanced by the advent of foundation models-large-scale, pre-trained AI models capable of performing a wide array of tasks with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of foundation models in the remote sensing domain. We categorize these models based on their architectures, pre-training datasets, and methodologies. Through detailed performance comparisons, we highlight emerging trends and the significant advancements achieved by those foundation models. Additionally, we discuss technical challenges, practical implications, and future research directions, addressing the need for high-quality data, computational resources, and improved model generalization. Our research also finds that pre-training methods, particularly self-supervised learning techniques like contrastive learning and masked autoencoders, remarkably enhance the performance and robustness of foundation models. This survey aims to serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners by providing a panorama of advances and promising pathways for continued development and application of foundation models in remote sensing.

Junlin Guo, James R. Zimmer-Dauphinee, Jordan M. Nieusma et al.

By mapping sites at large scales using remotely sensed data, archaeologists can generate unique insights into long-term demographic trends, inter-regional social networks, and past adaptations to climate change. Remote sensing surveys complement field-based approaches, and their reach can be especially great when combined with deep learning and computer vision techniques. However, conventional supervised deep learning methods face challenges in annotating fine-grained archaeological features at scale. While recent vision foundation models have shown remarkable success in learning large-scale remote sensing data with minimal annotations, most off-the-shelf solutions are designed for RGB images rather than multi-spectral satellite imagery, such as the 8-band data used in our study. In this paper, we introduce DeepAndes, a transformer-based vision foundation model trained on three million multi-spectral satellite images, specifically tailored for Andean archaeology. DeepAndes incorporates a customized DINOv2 self-supervised learning algorithm optimized for 8-band multi-spectral imagery, marking the first foundation model designed explicitly for the Andes region. We evaluate its image understanding performance through imbalanced image classification, image instance retrieval, and pixel-level semantic segmentation tasks. Our experiments show that DeepAndes achieves superior F1 scores, mean average precision, and Dice scores in few-shot learning scenarios, significantly outperforming models trained from scratch or pre-trained on smaller datasets. This underscores the effectiveness of large-scale self-supervised pre-training in archaeological remote sensing. Codes will be available on https://github.com/geopacha/DeepAndes.