Search Results (2)

With the rapid growth of multimodal remote sensing (RS) data, there is an increasing demand for intelligent onboard computing to alleviate the transmission and latency bottlenecks of traditional orbit-to-ground downlinking workflows. While many lightweight AI algorithms have been widely developed and deployed for onboard inference, their limited generalization capability restricts performance under the diverse and dynamic conditions of advanced Earth observation. Recent advances in remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) offer a promising solution by providing pretrained representations with strong adaptability across diverse tasks and modalities. However, the deployment of RSFMs onboard resource-constrained devices such as nano satellites remains a significant challenge due to strict limitations in memory, energy, computation, and radiation tolerance. To this end, this review proposes the first comprehensive survey of onboard RSFMs deployment, where a unified deployment pipeline including RSFMs development, model compression techniques, and hardware optimization is introduced and surveyed in detail. Available hardware platforms are also discussed and compared, based on which some typical case studies for low Earth orbit (LEO) CubeSats are presented to analyze the feasibility of onboard RSFMs’ deployment. To conclude, this review aims to serve as a practical roadmap for future research on the deployment of RSFMs on edge devices, bridging the gap between the large-scale RSFMs and the resource constraints of spaceborne platforms for onboard computing. Full article

Remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) have demonstrated excellent feature extraction and reasoning capabilities under the self-supervised learning paradigm of “unlabeled datasets—model pre-training—downstream tasks”. These models achieve superior accuracy and performance compared to existing models across numerous open benchmark datasets. However, when confronted with multimodal data, such as optical, LiDAR, SAR, text, video, and audio, the RSFMs exhibit limitations in cross-modal generalization and multi-task learning. Although several reviews have addressed the RSFMs, there is currently no comprehensive survey dedicated to vision–X (vision, language, audio, position) multimodal RSFMs (MM-RSFMs). To tackle this gap, this article provides a systematic review of MM-RSFMs from a novel perspective. Firstly, the key technologies underlying MM-RSFMs are reviewed and analyzed, and the available multimodal RS pre-training datasets are summarized. Then, recent advances in MM-RSFMs are classified according to the development of backbone networks and cross-modal interaction methods of vision–X, such as vision–vision, vision–language, vision–audio, vision–position, and vision–language–audio. Finally, potential challenges are analyzed, and perspectives for MM-RSFMs are outlined. This survey from this paper reveals that current MM-RSFMs face the following key challenges: (1) a scarcity of high-quality multimodal datasets, (2) limited capability for multimodal feature extraction, (3) weak cross-task generalization, (4) absence of unified evaluation criteria, and (5) insufficient security measures. Full article