MetaEarth-MM: Unified Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Generation with Scene-centered Joint Modeling

TL;DR

MetaEarth-MM is a unified foundation model for multi-modal remote sensing image generation, enabling flexible cross-modal translation and scene-centric joint modeling across five modalities.

Contribution

It introduces a scene-centered joint modeling paradigm and a decoupled architecture for multi-modal remote sensing image generation, supported by a large-scale dataset.

Findings

Strong generative capability across diverse tasks

Robust generalization to unseen modalities

Supports downstream Earth observation tasks

Abstract

Multi-modal remote sensing images are vital for Earth observation, yet complete paired observations are often scarce in practice. Existing generative methods commonly address this problem through isolated pairwise modality translation, but their versatility and scalability remain limited as the number of modalities and generation tasks increases. Here, we develop a generative foundation model MetaEarth-MM for multi-modal remote sensing imagery, enabling paired joint generation and any-to-any translation across five modalities within a unified model. Recognizing the intrinsic scene consistency underlying multi-modal observations, we introduce a scene-centered joint modeling paradigm in MetaEarth-MM. Unlike previous methods that rely on direct appearance-level cross-modal mapping, our model organizes the generation around the underlying scene content. Specifically, MetaEarth-MM adopts a decoupled architecture that first infers a latent scene representation from available observations, and then generates target modalities conditioned on this intermediate state. To support training, we further construct EarthMM, a large-scale dataset comprising 2.8 million multi-resolution global images with 2.2 million aligned pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaEarth-MM not only exhibits strong generative capability and robust generalization across diverse generation tasks, but also supports downstream tasks at both data and representation levels, highlighting its potential as a general foundation model for cross-modal Earth observation. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/YZPioneer/MetaEarth-MM.