Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Toward Remote Sensing Foundation Model

Large-scale vision foundation models have made significant progress in visual tasks on natural images, with vision transformers (ViTs) being the primary choice due to their good scalability and representation ability. However, large-scale models in remote sensing (RS) have not yet been sufficiently explored. In this article, we resort to plain ViTs with about 100 million parameters and make the first attempt to propose large vision models tailored to RS tasks and investigate how such large models perform. To handle the large sizes and objects of arbitrary orientations in RS images, we propose a new rotated varied-size window attention to replace the original full attention in transformers, which can…

• NN
  National Natural Science Foundation of China

  Awards: 62225113, 62141112, 41871243
• AR
  Australian Research Council

  Award: FL-170100117