Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoring: Proposal for a Climate Change Benchmark

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new benchmark for developing foundation models tailored to Earth monitoring and climate change, aiming to improve applications and foster collaboration in the field.

Contribution

It introduces a climate change benchmark for foundation models in Earth monitoring, addressing the gap in existing models for remote sensing data.

Findings

Benchmark will enable better evaluation of models for climate-related tasks

Potential to improve existing Earth monitoring applications

Facilitates development of new climate change detection methods

Abstract

Recent progress in self-supervision shows that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to impressive increases in generalisation for downstream tasks. Such models, recently coined as foundation models, have been transformational to the field of natural language processing. While similar models have also been trained on large corpuses of images, they are not well suited for remote sensing data. To stimulate the development of foundation models for Earth monitoring, we propose to develop a new benchmark comprised of a variety of downstream tasks related to climate change. We believe that this can lead to substantial improvements in many existing applications and facilitate the development of new applications. This proposal is also a call for collaboration with the aim of developing a better evaluation process to mitigate potential downsides of foundation models for Earth monitoring.