Towards a Unified Copernicus Foundation Model for Earth Vision
Authors: name: Yi Wang; name: Zhitong Xiong; name: Chenying Liu; name: Adam J. Stewart; name: Thomas Dujardin; name: Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos; name: Angelos Zavras; name: Franziska Gerken; name: Ioannis Papoutsis; name: Laura Leal-Taixé; name: Xiao Xiang Zhu
Published: 2025-03-14 20:16:48

Abstract: Advances in Earth observation (EO) foundation models have unlocked the
potential of big satellite data to learn generic representations from space,
benefiting a wide range of downstream applications crucial to our planet.
However, most existing efforts remain limited to fixed spectral sensors, focus
solely on the Earth's surface, and overlook valuable metadata beyond imagery.
In this work, we take a step towards next-generation EO foundation models with
three key components: 1) Copernicus-Pretrain, a massive-scale pretraining
dataset that integrates 18.7M aligned images from all major Copernicus Sentinel
missions, spanning from the Earth's surface to its atmosphere; 2)
Copernicus-FM, a unified foundation model capable of processing any spectral or
non-spectral sensor modality using extended dynamic hypernetworks and flexible
metadata encoding; and 3) Copernicus-Bench, a systematic evaluation benchmark
with 15 hierarchical downstream tasks ranging from preprocessing to specialized
applications for each Sentinel mission. Our dataset, model, and benchmark
greatly improve the scalability, versatility, and multimodal adaptability of EO
foundation models, while also creating new opportunities to connect EO,
weather, and climate research. Codes, datasets and models are available at
https://github.com/zhu-xlab/Copernicus-FM.