TOV: The Original Vision Model for Optical Remote Sensing Image Understanding via Self-Supervised Learning

Are we on the right way for remote sensing image understanding (RSIU) by training models in a supervised data-dependent and task-dependent manner, instead of original human vision in a label-free and task-independent way? We argue that a more desirable RSIU model should be trained with intrinsic structure from data rather than extrinsic human labels to realize generalizability across a wide range of RSIU tasks. According to this hypothesis, we proposed T he O riginal V ision (TOV) model in the remote sensing field. Trained by massive unlabeled optical data along a human-like self-supervised learning (SSL) path that is from general knowledge to specialized knowledge, TOV model can be easily adapted to various RSIU tasks, including scene classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, and outperforms dominant ImageNet supervised pretrained method as well as two recently proposed SSL pretrained methods on the majority of 12 publicly available benchmarks. Moreover, we analyze the influences of two key factors on the performance of building TOV model for RSIU, including the influence of using different data sampling methods and the selection of learning paths during self-supervised optimization. We believe that a general model which is trained in a label-free and task-independent way may be the next paradigm for RSIU and hope the insights distilled from this study can help to foster the development of an original vision model for RSIU. The source code is available at https://github.com/GeoX-Lab/G-RSIM/tree/main/TOV_v1 .