# Interactive Masked Image Modeling for Multimodal Object Detection in Remote Sensing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08885 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08885/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12210/) (2023)
- [EfficientSAM: Leveraged Masked Image Pretraining for Efficient Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00863/) (2023)
- [What to Hide from Your Students: Attention-Guided Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12719/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning in Multimodal Remote Sensing Data Fusion: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01380/) (2022)
- [Detecting tiny objects in aerial images: A normalized Wasserstein distance and a new benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13996/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Coordination of Frequency and Attention in Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15362/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LCMF: Lightweight Cross-Modality Mambaformer for Embodied Robotics VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18576/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object detection in remote sensing imagery plays a vital role in various Earth observation applications. However, unlike object detection in natural scene images, this task is particularly challenging due to the abundance of small, often barely visible objects across diverse terrains. To address these challenges, multimodal learning can be used to integrate features from different data modalities, thereby improving detection accuracy. Nonetheless, the performance of multimodal learning is often constrained by the limited size of labeled datasets. In this paper, we propose to use Masked Image Modeling (MIM) as a pre-training technique, leveraging self-supervised learning on unlabeled data to enhance detection performance. However, conventional MIM such as MAE which uses masked tokens without any contextual information, struggles to capture the fine-grained details due to a lack of interactions with other parts of image. To address this, we propose a new interactive MIM method that can establish interactions between different tokens, which is particularly beneficial for object detection in remote sensing. The extensive ablation studies and evluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
