SATGround: A Spatially-Aware Approach for Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing
This work addresses the challenge of precisely localizing objects in complex satellite scenes for remote sensing applications, representing a strong specific gain in this domain.
The paper tackled the problem of visual grounding in satellite imagery by proposing a novel structured localization mechanism that integrates spatial reasoning into vision-language models, resulting in a 24.8% relative improvement over previous methods on visual grounding benchmarks.
Vision-language models (VLMs) are emerging as powerful generalist tools for remote sensing, capable of integrating information across diverse tasks and enabling flexible, instruction-based interactions via a chat interface. In this work, we enhance VLM-based visual grounding in satellite imagery by proposing a novel structured localization mechanism. Our approach involves finetuning a pretrained VLM on a diverse set of instruction-following tasks, while interfacing a dedicated grounding module through specialized control tokens for localization. This method facilitates joint reasoning over both language and spatial information, significantly enhancing the model's ability to precisely localize objects in complex satellite scenes. We evaluate our framework on several remote sensing benchmarks, consistently improving the state-of-the-art, including a 24.8% relative improvement over previous methods on visual grounding. Our results highlight the benefits of integrating structured spatial reasoning into VLMs, paving the way for more reliable real-world satellite data analysis.