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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Demilt, Ryan P., LaHaye, Nicholas, Tenneson, Karis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03316
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author Demilt, Ryan P.
LaHaye, Nicholas
Tenneson, Karis
author_facet Demilt, Ryan P.
LaHaye, Nicholas
Tenneson, Karis
contents Earth Observation Foundation Models (EOFMs) have exploded in prevalence as tools for processing the massive volumes of remotely sensed and other earth observation data, and for delivering impact on the many essential earth monitoring tasks. An emerging trend posits using the outputs of pre-trained models as 'embeddings' which summarize high dimensional data to be used for generic tasks such as similarity search and content-specific queries. However, most EOFM models are trained only on single modalities of data and then applied or benchmarked by matching bands across different modalities. It is not clear from existing work what impact diverse sensor architectures have on the internal representations of the present suite of EOFMs. We show in this work that the representation space of EOFMs is highly sensitive to sensor architecture and that understanding this difference gives a vital perspective on the pitfalls of current EOFM design and signals for how to move forward as model developers, users, and a community guided by robust remote-sensing science.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03316
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The View From Space: Navigating Instrumentation Differences with EOFMs
Demilt, Ryan P.
LaHaye, Nicholas
Tenneson, Karis
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Earth Observation Foundation Models (EOFMs) have exploded in prevalence as tools for processing the massive volumes of remotely sensed and other earth observation data, and for delivering impact on the many essential earth monitoring tasks. An emerging trend posits using the outputs of pre-trained models as 'embeddings' which summarize high dimensional data to be used for generic tasks such as similarity search and content-specific queries. However, most EOFM models are trained only on single modalities of data and then applied or benchmarked by matching bands across different modalities. It is not clear from existing work what impact diverse sensor architectures have on the internal representations of the present suite of EOFMs. We show in this work that the representation space of EOFMs is highly sensitive to sensor architecture and that understanding this difference gives a vital perspective on the pitfalls of current EOFM design and signals for how to move forward as model developers, users, and a community guided by robust remote-sensing science.
title The View From Space: Navigating Instrumentation Differences with EOFMs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03316