# RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11029 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/

## Key facts

- Cited by 363 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 83 of its 139 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00121/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 363)

- [EarthGPT: A Universal Multi-modal Large Language Model for Multi-sensor Image Comprehension in Remote Sensing Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16822/) (2024)
- [RS5M and GeoRSCLIP: A Large Scale Vision-Language Dataset and A Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11300/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models for Generalist Geospatial Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18660/) (2023)
- [LHRS-Bot: Empowering Remote Sensing with VGI-Enhanced Large Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02544/) (2024)
- [SkyScript: A Large and Semantically Diverse Vision-Language Dataset for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12856/) (2023)
- [VRSBench: A Versatile Vision-Language Benchmark Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12384/) (2024)
- [Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13721/) (2023)
- [EarthDial: Turning Multi-sensory Earth Observations to Interactive Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15190/) (2024)
- [The Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Remote Sensing Applications: From Zero to One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16623/) (2023)
- [AnySat: One Earth Observation Model for Many Resolutions, Scales, and Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14123/) (2024)
- [Remote Sensing Vision-Language Foundation Models without Annotations via Ground Remote Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06960/) (2023)
- [VL-JEPA: Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Vision-language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10942/) (2025)
- [GEOBench-VLM: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Geospatial Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19325/) (2024)
- [Locate Anything on Earth: Advancing Open-Vocabulary Object Detection for Remote Sensing Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09110/) (2024)
- [UAVs Meet LLMs: Overviews and Perspectives Toward Agentic Low-Altitude Mobility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02341/) (2025)
- [Text2Earth: Unlocking Text-driven Remote Sensing Image Generation with a Global-Scale Dataset and a Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00895/) (2025)
- [A New Learning Paradigm for Foundation Model-based Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01163/) (2023)
- [MetaEarth: A Generative Foundation Model for Global-Scale Remote Sensing Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13570/) (2024)
- [RemoteSAM: Towards Segment Anything for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18022/) (2025)
- [TESSERA: Temporal Embeddings of Surface Spectra for Earth Representation and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20380/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning with Polite Flamingo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01003/) (2023)
- [Dual Prototype Evolving for Test-Time Generalization of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12790/) (2024)
- [Towards Vision-Language Geo-Foundation Model: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09385/) (2024)
- [AeroGen: Enhancing Remote Sensing Object Detection with Diffusion-Driven Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15497/) (2024)
- [When Large Vision-Language Model Meets Large Remote Sensing Imagery: Coarse-to-Fine Text-Guided Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07588/) (2025)
- [On the Foundations of Earth and Climate Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04285/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Captioning and Retrieving Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06475/) (2024)
- [Multi-Label Guided Soft Contrastive Learning for Efficient Earth Observation Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20462/) (2024)
- [CityBench: Evaluating the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Urban Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13945/) (2024)
- [CrossEarth: Geospatial Vision Foundation Model for Domain Generalizable Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22629/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

General-purpose foundation models have led to recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. In remote sensing, self-supervised learning (SSL) and Masked Image Modeling (MIM) have been adopted to build foundation models. However, these models primarily learn low-level features and require annotated data for fine-tuning. Moreover, they are inapplicable for retrieval and zero-shot applications due to the lack of language understanding. To address these limitations, we propose RemoteCLIP, the first vision-language foundation model for remote sensing that aims to learn robust visual features with rich semantics and aligned text embeddings for seamless downstream application. To address the scarcity of pre-training data, we leverage data scaling which converts heterogeneous annotations into a unified image-caption data format based on Box-to-Caption (B2C) and Mask-to-Box (M2B) conversion. By further incorporating UAV imagery, we produce a 12 × larger pretraining dataset than the combination of all available datasets. RemoteCLIP can be applied to a variety of downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification, linear probing, textitk-NN classification, few-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and object counting in remote sensing images. Evaluation on 16 datasets, including a newly introduced RemoteCount benchmark to test the object counting ability, shows that RemoteCLIP consistently outperforms baseline foundation models across different model scales. Impressively, RemoteCLIP beats the state-of-the-art method by 9.14% mean recall on the RSITMD dataset and 8.92% on the RSICD dataset. For zero-shot classification, our RemoteCLIP outperforms the CLIP baseline by up to 6.39% average accuracy on 12 downstream datasets. Project website: https://github.com/ChenDelong1999/RemoteCLIP