REOBench: Benchmarking Robustness of Earth Observation Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Xiang, Tao, Yong, Zhang, Siyuan, Liu, Siwei, Xiong, Zhitong, Luo, Chunbo, Liu, Lu, Pechenizkiy, Mykola, Zhu, Xiao Xiang, Huang, Tianjin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Xiang
Tao, Yong
Zhang, Siyuan
Liu, Siwei
Xiong, Zhitong
Luo, Chunbo
Liu, Lu
Pechenizkiy, Mykola
Zhu, Xiao Xiang
Huang, Tianjin
author_facet Li, Xiang
Tao, Yong
Zhang, Siyuan
Liu, Siwei
Xiong, Zhitong
Luo, Chunbo
Liu, Lu
Pechenizkiy, Mykola
Zhu, Xiao Xiang
Huang, Tianjin
contents Earth observation foundation models have shown strong generalization across multiple Earth observation tasks, but their robustness under real-world perturbations remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce REOBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the robustness of Earth observation foundation models across six tasks and twelve types of image corruptions, including both appearance-based and geometric perturbations. To ensure realistic and fine-grained evaluation, our benchmark focuses on high-resolution optical remote sensing images, which are widely used in critical applications such as urban planning and disaster response. We conduct a systematic evaluation of a broad range of models trained using masked image modeling, contrastive learning, and vision-language pre-training paradigms. Our results reveal that (1) existing Earth observation foundation models experience significant performance degradation when exposed to input corruptions. (2) The severity of degradation varies across tasks, model architectures, backbone sizes, and types of corruption, with performance drop varying from less than 1% to over 20%. (3) Vision-language models show enhanced robustness, particularly in multimodal tasks. REOBench underscores the vulnerability of current Earth observation foundation models to real-world corruptions and provides actionable insights for developing more robust and reliable models. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/lx709/REOBench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_16793
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle REOBench: Benchmarking Robustness of Earth Observation Foundation Models
Li, Xiang
Tao, Yong
Zhang, Siyuan
Liu, Siwei
Xiong, Zhitong
Luo, Chunbo
Liu, Lu
Pechenizkiy, Mykola
Zhu, Xiao Xiang
Huang, Tianjin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Earth observation foundation models have shown strong generalization across multiple Earth observation tasks, but their robustness under real-world perturbations remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce REOBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the robustness of Earth observation foundation models across six tasks and twelve types of image corruptions, including both appearance-based and geometric perturbations. To ensure realistic and fine-grained evaluation, our benchmark focuses on high-resolution optical remote sensing images, which are widely used in critical applications such as urban planning and disaster response. We conduct a systematic evaluation of a broad range of models trained using masked image modeling, contrastive learning, and vision-language pre-training paradigms. Our results reveal that (1) existing Earth observation foundation models experience significant performance degradation when exposed to input corruptions. (2) The severity of degradation varies across tasks, model architectures, backbone sizes, and types of corruption, with performance drop varying from less than 1% to over 20%. (3) Vision-language models show enhanced robustness, particularly in multimodal tasks. REOBench underscores the vulnerability of current Earth observation foundation models to real-world corruptions and provides actionable insights for developing more robust and reliable models. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/lx709/REOBench.
title REOBench: Benchmarking Robustness of Earth Observation Foundation Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16793