GeoHeight-Bench: Towards Height-Aware Multimodal Reasoning in Remote Sensing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new evaluation framework and baseline model for height-aware reasoning in remote sensing, addressing the vertical dimension often neglected by existing multimodal models.

Contribution

It develops a scalable data generation pipeline and benchmarks for height-aware remote sensing understanding, and proposes GeoHeightChat, the first height-aware LMM baseline.

Findings

GeoHeight-Bench and GeoHeight-Bench+ enable height-aware evaluation.

GeoHeightChat effectively incorporates height perception into remote sensing models.

Abstract

Current Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in Earth Observation typically neglect the critical "vertical" dimension, limiting their reasoning capabilities in complex remote sensing geometries and disaster scenarios where physical spatial structures often outweigh planar visual textures. To bridge this gap, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework dedicated to height-aware remote sensing understanding. First, to overcome the severe scarcity of annotated data, we develop a scalable, VLM-driven data generation pipeline utilizing systematic prompt engineering and metadata extraction. This pipeline constructs two complementary benchmarks: GeoHeight-Bench for relative height analysis, and a more challenging GeoHeight-Bench+ for holistic, terrain-aware reasoning. Furthermore, to validate the necessity of height perception, we propose GeoHeightChat, the first height-aware remote sensing LMM baseline. Serving as a strong proof of concept, our baseline demonstrates that synergizing visual semantics with implicitly injected height geometric features effectively mitigates the "vertical blind spot", successfully unlocking a new paradigm of interactive height reasoning in existing optical models.