NeighborMAE: Exploiting Spatial Dependencies between Neighboring Earth Observation Images in Masked Autoencoders Pretraining

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zeng, Liang, Marsocci, Valerio, Zhao, Wufan, Nascetti, Andrea, Vergauwen, Maarten
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Zeng, Liang
Marsocci, Valerio
Zhao, Wufan
Nascetti, Andrea
Vergauwen, Maarten
author_facet Zeng, Liang
Marsocci, Valerio
Zhao, Wufan
Nascetti, Andrea
Vergauwen, Maarten
contents Masked Image Modeling has been one of the most popular self-supervised learning paradigms to learn representations from large-scale, unlabeled Earth Observation images. While incorporating multi-modal and multi-temporal Earth Observation data into Masked Image Modeling has been widely explored, the spatial dependencies between images captured from neighboring areas remains largely overlooked. Since the Earth's surface is continuous, neighboring images are highly related and offer rich contextual information for self-supervised learning. To close this gap, we propose NeighborMAE, which learns spatial dependencies by joint reconstruction of neighboring Earth Observation images. To ensure that the reconstruction remains challenging, we leverage a heuristic strategy to dynamically adjust the mask ratio and the pixel-level loss weight. Experimental results across various pretraining datasets and downstream tasks show that NeighborMAE significantly outperforms existing baselines, underscoring the value of neighboring images in Masked Image Modeling for Earth Observation and the efficacy of our designs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02522
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NeighborMAE: Exploiting Spatial Dependencies between Neighboring Earth Observation Images in Masked Autoencoders Pretraining
Zeng, Liang
Marsocci, Valerio
Zhao, Wufan
Nascetti, Andrea
Vergauwen, Maarten
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Masked Image Modeling has been one of the most popular self-supervised learning paradigms to learn representations from large-scale, unlabeled Earth Observation images. While incorporating multi-modal and multi-temporal Earth Observation data into Masked Image Modeling has been widely explored, the spatial dependencies between images captured from neighboring areas remains largely overlooked. Since the Earth's surface is continuous, neighboring images are highly related and offer rich contextual information for self-supervised learning. To close this gap, we propose NeighborMAE, which learns spatial dependencies by joint reconstruction of neighboring Earth Observation images. To ensure that the reconstruction remains challenging, we leverage a heuristic strategy to dynamically adjust the mask ratio and the pixel-level loss weight. Experimental results across various pretraining datasets and downstream tasks show that NeighborMAE significantly outperforms existing baselines, underscoring the value of neighboring images in Masked Image Modeling for Earth Observation and the efficacy of our designs.
title NeighborMAE: Exploiting Spatial Dependencies between Neighboring Earth Observation Images in Masked Autoencoders Pretraining
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02522