Fewshot learning on global multimodal embeddings for earth observation tasks

In this work we pretrain a CLIP/ViT based model using three different modalities of satellite imagery across five AOIs covering over ~10% of Earth's total landmass, namely Sentinel 2 RGB optical imagery, Sentinel 1 SAR radar amplitude and interferometric coherence. This model uses ~ 250 M parameters. Then, we use the embeddings produced for each modality with a classical machine learning method to attempt different downstream tasks for earth observation related to vegetation, built up surface, croplands and permanent water. We consistently show how we reduce the need for labeled data by 99%, so that with ~200-500 randomly selected labeled examples (around 4K-10K km2) we reach performance levels analogous to those achieved with the full labeled datasets (about 150K image chips or 3M km2 in each area of interest - AOI) on all modalities, AOIs and downstream tasks. This leads us to think that the model has captured significant earth features useful in a wide variety of scenarios. To enhance our model's usability in practice, its architecture allows inference in contexts with missing modalities and even missing channels within each modality. Additionally, we visually show that this embedding space, obtained with no labels, is sensible to the different earth features represented by the labelled datasets we selected.