# Survey of Multimodal Geospatial Foundation Models: Techniques, Applications, and Challenges

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22964 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22964/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 109 of its 184 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 109)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00121/) (2017)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [InternImage: Exploring Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models with Deformable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05778/) (2022)
- [SatMAE: Pre-training Transformers for Temporal and Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08051/) (2022)
- [RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/) (2023)
- [AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05167/) (2016)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15826/) (2023)
- [Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14532/) (2022)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [SpectralGPT: Spectral Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07113/) (2023)
- [BigEarthNet: A Large-Scale Benchmark Archive For Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06148/) (2019)
- [Seasonal Contrast: Unsupervised Pre-Training from Uncurated Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16607/) (2021)
- [RSGPT: A Remote Sensing Vision Language Model and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15266/) (2023)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Understanding, Visualizing and Interpreting Deep Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08296/) (2017)
- [SkySense: A Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Foundation Model Towards Universal Interpretation for Earth Observation Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10115/) (2023)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [RSVQA: Visual Question Answering for Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07333/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Ecological mapping with geospatial foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10720/) (2026)
- [Uncertainty-aware tree height change regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00638/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models for Remote Sensing Image Understanding: Domain-Specific or General-Purpose?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20284/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models have transformed natural language processing and computer vision, and their impact is now reshaping remote sensing image analysis. With powerful generalization and transfer learning capabilities, they align naturally with the multimodal, multi-resolution, and multi-temporal characteristics of remote sensing data. To address unique challenges in the field, multimodal geospatial foundation models (GFMs) have emerged as a dedicated research frontier. This survey delivers a comprehensive review of multimodal GFMs from a modality-driven perspective, covering five core visual and vision-language modalities. We examine how differences in imaging physics and data representation shape interaction design, and we analyze key techniques for alignment, integration, and knowledge transfer to tackle modality heterogeneity, distribution shifts, and semantic gaps. Advances in training paradigms, architectures, and task-specific adaptation strategies are systematically assessed alongside a wealth of emerging benchmarks. Representative multimodal visual and vision-language GFMs are evaluated across ten downstream tasks, with insights into their architectures, performance, and application scenarios. Real-world case studies, spanning land cover mapping, agricultural monitoring, disaster response, climate studies, and geospatial intelligence, demonstrate the practical potential of GFMs. Finally, we outline pressing challenges in domain generalization, interpretability, efficiency, and privacy, and chart promising avenues for future research.