The foundation model has recently garnered significant attention due to its potential to revolutionize the field of visual representation learning in a self-supervised manner. While most foundation models are tailored to effectively process RGB images for various visual tasks, there is a noticeable gap in research focused on spectral data, which offers valuable information for scene understanding, especially in remote sensing (RS) applications. To fill this gap, we created for the first time a universal RS foundation model, named SpectralGPT, which is purpose-built to handle spectral RS images using a novel 3D generative pretrained transformer (GPT). Compared to existing foundation models, SpectralGPT 1) accommodates input images with varying sizes, resolutions, time series, and regions in a progressive training fashion, enabling full utilization of extensive RS Big Data; 2) leverages 3D token generation for spatial-spectral coupling; 3) captures spectrally sequential patterns via multi-target reconstruction; 4) trains on one million spectral RS images, yielding models with over 600 million parameters. Our evaluation highlights significant performance improvements with pretrained SpectralGPT models, signifying substantial potential in advancing spectral RS Big Data applications within the field of geoscience across four downstream tasks: single/multi-label scene classification, semantic segmentation, and change detection.

In January 2006, the Data Fusion Committee of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society launched a public contest for pansharpening algorithms, which aimed to identify the ones that perform best. Seven research groups worldwide participated in the contest, testing eight algorithms following different philosophies [component substitution, multiresolution analysis (MRA), detail injection, etc.]. Several complete data sets from two different sensors, namely, QuickBird and simulated Pleiades, were delivered to all participants. The fusion results were collected and evaluated, both visually and objectively. Quantitative results of pansharpening were possible owing to the availability of reference originals obtained either by simulating the data collected from the satellite sensor by means of higher resolution data from an airborne platform, in the case of the Pleiades data, or by first degrading all the available data to a coarser resolution and saving the original as the reference, in the case of the QuickBird data. The evaluation results were presented during the special session on data fusion at the 2006 international geoscience and remote sensing symposium in Denver, and these are discussed in further detail in this paper. Two algorithms outperform all the others, the visual analysis being confirmed by the quantitative evaluation. These two methods share the same philosophy: they basically rely on MRA and employ adaptive models for the injection of high-pass details.

Spectral unmixing is a technique for remotely sensed image interpretation that expresses each (possibly mixed) pixel as a combination of pure spectral signatures (endmembers) and their fractional abundances. In this paper, we develop a new technique for unsupervised unmixing which is based on a deep autoencoder network (DAEN). Our newly developed DAEN consists of two parts. The first part of the network adopts stacked autoencoders (SAEs) to learn spectral signatures, so as to generate a good initialization for the unmixing process. In the second part of the network, a variational autoencoder (VAE) is employed to perform blind source separation, aimed at obtaining the endmember signatures and abundance fractions simultaneously. By taking advantage from the SAEs, the robustness of the proposed approach is remarkable as it can unmix data sets with outliers and low signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, the multihidden layers of the VAE ensure the required constraints (nonnegativity and sum-to-one) when estimating the abundances. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated using both synthetic and real hyperspectral data. When compared with other unmixing methods, the proposed approach demonstrates very competitive performance.

Hyperspectral image classification has been an active topic of research in recent years. In the past, many different types of features have been extracted (using both linear and nonlinear strategies) for classification problems. On the one hand, some approaches have exploited the original spectral information or other features linearly derived from such information in order to have classes which are linearly separable. On the other hand, other techniques have exploited features obtained through nonlinear transformations intended to reduce data dimensionality, to better model the inherent nonlinearity of the original data (e.g., kernels) or to adequately exploit the spatial information contained in the scene (e.g., using morphological analysis). Special attention has been given to techniques able to exploit a single kind of features, such as composite kernel learning or multiple kernel learning, developed in order to deal with multiple kernels. However, few approaches have been designed to integrate multiple types of features extracted from both linear and nonlinear transformations. In this paper, we develop a new framework for the classification of hyperspectral scenes that pursues the combination of multiple features. The ultimate goal of the proposed framework is to be able to cope with linear and nonlinear class boundaries present in the data, thus following the two main mixing models considered for hyperspectral data interpretation. An important characteristic of the presented approach is that it does not require any regularization parameters to control the weights of considered features so that different types of features can be efficiently exploited and integrated in a collaborative and flexible way. Our experimental results, conducted using a variety of input features and hyperspectral scenes, indicate that the proposed framework for multiple feature learning provides state-of-the-art classification results without significantly increasing computational complexity.

Remote sensing is one of the most common ways to extract relevant information about Earth and our environment. Remote sensing acquisitions can be done by both active (synthetic aperture radar, LiDAR) and passive (optical and thermal range, multispectral and hyperspectral) devices. According to the sensor, a variety of information about the Earth's surface can be obtained. The data acquired by these sensors can provide information about the structure (optical, synthetic aperture radar), elevation (LiDAR), and material content (multispectral and hyperspectral) of the objects in the image. Once considered together their complementarity can be helpful for characterizing land use (urban analysis, precision agriculture), damage detection (e.g., in natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, oil spills in seas), and give insights to potential exploitation of resources (oil fields, minerals). In addition, repeated acquisitions of a scene at different times allows one to monitor natural resources and environmental variables (vegetation phenology, snow cover), anthropological effects (urban sprawl, deforestation), climate changes (desertification, coastal erosion), among others. In this paper, we sketch the current opportunities and challenges related to the exploitation of multimodal data for Earth observation. This is done by leveraging the outcomes of the data fusion contests, organized by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society since 2006. We will report on the outcomes of these contests, presenting the multimodal sets of data made available to the community each year, the targeted applications, and an analysis of the submitted methods and results: How was multimodality considered and integrated in the processing chain? What were the improvements/new opportunities offered by the fusion? What were the objectives to be addressed and the reported solutions? And from this, what will be the next challenges?