Natural Language-Driven Global Mapping of Martian Landforms

TL;DR

MarScope is a novel vision-language framework that enables natural language-driven, label-free mapping of Martian landforms, transforming planetary geomorphic analysis by allowing flexible, rapid, and semantic retrieval across the entire planet.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, natural language-based approach for planetary surface mapping, replacing traditional classifications with semantic retrieval in a shared image-text space.

Findings

Achieves F1 scores up to 0.978 in landform identification.

Enables rapid (5 seconds) semantic queries across Mars.

Extends beyond morphology to process-oriented and similarity-based mapping.

Abstract

Planetary surfaces are typically analyzed using high-level semantic concepts in natural language, yet vast orbital image archives remain organized at the pixel level. This mismatch limits scalable, open-ended exploration of planetary surfaces. Here we present MarScope, a planetary-scale vision-language framework enabling natural language-driven, label-free mapping of Martian landforms. MarScope aligns planetary images and text in a shared semantic space, trained on over 200,000 curated image-text pairs. This framework transforms global geomorphic mapping on Mars by replacing pre-defined classifications with flexible semantic retrieval, enabling arbitrary user queries across the entire planet in 5 seconds with F1 scores up to 0.978. Applications further show that it extends beyond morphological classification to facilitate process-oriented analysis and similarity-based geomorphological mapping at a planetary scale. MarScope establishes a new paradigm where natural language serves as a direct interface for scientific discovery over massive geospatial datasets.