BigEarthNet.txt: A Large-Scale Multi-Sensor Image-Text Dataset and Benchmark for Earth Observation

원문 초록

Vision-langugage models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in computer vision (CV), yet their performance on remote sensing (RS) data remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, multi-sensor RS image-text datasets with diverse textual annotations. Existing datasets predominantly include aerial Red-Green-Blue imagery, with short or weakly grounded captions, and provide limited diversity in annotation types. To address this limitation, we introduce BigEarthNet$.$txt, a large-scale, multi-sensor image-text dataset designed to advance instruction-driven image-text learning in Earth observation across multiple tasks. It contains 464044 co-registered Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar and Sentinel-2 multispectral images with 9.6M text annotations, including: i) geographically anchored captions describing land-use/land-cover (LULC) classes, their spatial relations, and environmental context; ii) visual question answering pairs relevant for different tasks; and iii) referring expression detection instructions for bounding box prediction. A comparative statistical analysis shows that BigEarthNet$.$txt surpasses existing RS image-text datasets in textual richness and annotation type variety. We further establish a manually-verified benchmark split and extensively evaluate existing VLMs in RS and CV. The results show the limitations of these models on tasks that involve complex LULC classes, whereas fine-tuning using BigEarthNet$.$txt results in consistent performance gains across all considered tasks. Our code and data are publicly available at https://txt.bigearth.net.