Rank-based Geographical Regularization: Revisiting Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Multispectral Remote Sensing Imagery
This work addresses the problem of learning from unlabeled remote sensing data for domain-specific applications, representing an incremental improvement with novel regularization.
The paper tackles the challenge of applying self-supervised learning to multispectral remote sensing imagery by introducing GeoRank, a regularization method that embeds geographical relationships into features, resulting in performance that matches or outperforms prior methods.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become a powerful paradigm for learning from large, unlabeled datasets, particularly in computer vision (CV). However, applying SSL to multispectral remote sensing (RS) images presents unique challenges and opportunities due to the geographical and temporal variability of the data. In this paper, we introduce GeoRank, a novel regularization method for contrastive SSL that improves upon prior techniques by directly optimizing spherical distances to embed geographical relationships into the learned feature space. GeoRank outperforms or matches prior methods that integrate geographical metadata and consistently improves diverse contrastive SSL algorithms (e.g., BYOL, DINO). Beyond this, we present a systematic investigation of key adaptations of contrastive SSL for multispectral RS images, including the effectiveness of data augmentations, the impact of dataset cardinality and image size on performance, and the task dependency of temporal views. Code is available at https://github.com/tomburgert/georank.