SatelliteCalculator: A Multi-Task Vision Foundation Model for Quantitative Remote Sensing Inversion
This addresses the challenge of generalizing vision models to multi-spectral remote sensing data for environmental monitoring, though it appears incremental as an adaptation of existing architectures.
The authors tackled the problem of applying vision foundation models to physically interpretable regression for quantitative remote sensing inversion, introducing SatelliteCalculator which achieved competitive accuracy across eight ecological indicators while significantly reducing inference costs.
Quantitative remote sensing inversion plays a critical role in environmental monitoring, enabling the estimation of key ecological variables such as vegetation indices, canopy structure, and carbon stock. Although vision foundation models have achieved remarkable progress in classification and segmentation tasks, their application to physically interpretable regression remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, the multi-spectral nature and geospatial heterogeneity of remote sensing data pose significant challenges for generalization and transferability. To address these issues, we introduce SatelliteCalculator, the first vision foundation model tailored for quantitative remote sensing inversion. By leveraging physically defined index formulas, we automatically construct a large-scale dataset of over one million paired samples across eight core ecological indicators. The model integrates a frozen Swin Transformer backbone with a prompt-guided architecture, featuring cross-attentive adapters and lightweight task-specific MLP decoders. Experiments on the Open-Canopy benchmark demonstrate that SatelliteCalculator achieves competitive accuracy across all tasks while significantly reducing inference cost. Our results validate the feasibility of applying foundation models to quantitative inversion, and provide a scalable framework for task-adaptive remote sensing estimation.