Observing Health Outcomes Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Geo-Context Guided Visual Transformer

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Li, Yu, DeSouza, Guilherme N., Rao, Praveen, Shyu, Chi-Ren
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917236306870272
author Li, Yu
DeSouza, Guilherme N.
Rao, Praveen
Shyu, Chi-Ren
author_facet Li, Yu
DeSouza, Guilherme N.
Rao, Praveen
Shyu, Chi-Ren
contents Visual transformers have driven major progress in remote sensing image analysis, particularly in object detection and segmentation. Recent vision-language and multimodal models further extend these capabilities by incorporating auxiliary information, including captions, question and answer pairs, and metadata, which broadens applications beyond conventional computer vision tasks. However, these models are typically optimized for semantic alignment between visual and textual content rather than geospatial understanding, and therefore are not suited for representing or reasoning with structured geospatial layers. In this study, we propose a novel model that enhances remote sensing imagery processing with guidance from auxiliary geospatial information. Our approach introduces a geospatial embedding mechanism that transforms diverse geospatial data into embedding patches that are spatially aligned with image patches. To facilitate cross-modal interaction, we design a guided attention module that dynamically integrates multimodal information by computing attention weights based on correlations with auxiliary data, thereby directing the model toward the most relevant regions. In addition, the module assigns distinct roles to individual attention heads, allowing the model to capture complementary aspects of the guidance information and improving the interpretability of its predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms existing pretrained geospatial foundation models in predicting disease prevalence, highlighting its effectiveness in multimodal geospatial understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_00110
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Observing Health Outcomes Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Geo-Context Guided Visual Transformer
Li, Yu
DeSouza, Guilherme N.
Rao, Praveen
Shyu, Chi-Ren
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Visual transformers have driven major progress in remote sensing image analysis, particularly in object detection and segmentation. Recent vision-language and multimodal models further extend these capabilities by incorporating auxiliary information, including captions, question and answer pairs, and metadata, which broadens applications beyond conventional computer vision tasks. However, these models are typically optimized for semantic alignment between visual and textual content rather than geospatial understanding, and therefore are not suited for representing or reasoning with structured geospatial layers. In this study, we propose a novel model that enhances remote sensing imagery processing with guidance from auxiliary geospatial information. Our approach introduces a geospatial embedding mechanism that transforms diverse geospatial data into embedding patches that are spatially aligned with image patches. To facilitate cross-modal interaction, we design a guided attention module that dynamically integrates multimodal information by computing attention weights based on correlations with auxiliary data, thereby directing the model toward the most relevant regions. In addition, the module assigns distinct roles to individual attention heads, allowing the model to capture complementary aspects of the guidance information and improving the interpretability of its predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms existing pretrained geospatial foundation models in predicting disease prevalence, highlighting its effectiveness in multimodal geospatial understanding.
title Observing Health Outcomes Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Geo-Context Guided Visual Transformer
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00110