RSPDBench: Benchmarking Vision Foundation Models on Earth Observation Tasks Under Physically Grounded Remote-Sensing Product Degradations

Vision foundation models targeting Earth observation (EO) tasks are commonly evaluated on clean downstream benchmarks, but operational EO products can already contain spatial, radiometric, alignment, noise, and harmonization defects before reaching the model. Existing robustness evaluations often use generic image corruptions or broad domain shifts, which do not isolate these product-level failure modes. We introduce RSPDBench, a physically grounded remote-sensing-product degradation benchmark for vision foundation models. RSPDBench evaluates five EO datasets, seven foundation-model entries, and two supervised baselines under audited primitive degradations and compound product chains. Each model is evaluated under its clean-selected native protocol, with robustness measured as the drop from its own clean baseline. Our analysis reveals that degradation sensitivity is strongly structured: resolution-conditioned and channel-grouped encoders protect different failure axes, and the same physical defect can hurt one model while helping another. Compound chains expose failures that isolated degradations do not predict, with model-dependent amplification, saturation, or component dominance, and excess drops up to 38 percentage points beyond the strongest component. These results show that EO robustness cannot be characterized by clean accuracy or generic perturbation tests alone; it must also be measured against the structured defects that remote-sensing products carry into deployment.