EarthMind: Towards Multi-Granular and Multi-Sensor Earth Observation
  with Large Multimodal Models
Authors: name: Yan Shu; name: Bin Ren; name: Zhitong Xiong; name: Danda Pani Paudel; name: Luc Van Gool; name: Begum Demir; name: Nicu Sebe; name: Paolo Rota
Published: 2025-06-02 13:36:05

Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated strong performance in
various vision-language tasks. However, they often struggle to comprehensively
understand Earth Observation (EO) data, which is critical for monitoring the
environment and the effects of human activity on it. In this work, we present
EarthMind, a novel vision-language framework for multi-granular and
multi-sensor EO data understanding. EarthMind features two core components: (1)
Spatial Attention Prompting (SAP), which reallocates attention within the LLM
to enhance pixel-level understanding; and (2) Cross-modal Fusion, which aligns
heterogeneous modalities into a shared space and adaptively reweighs tokens
based on their information density for effective fusion. To facilitate
multi-sensor fusion evaluation, we propose EarthMind-Bench, a comprehensive
benchmark with over 2,000 human-annotated multi-sensor image-question pairs,
covering a wide range of perception and reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments
demonstrate the effectiveness of EarthMind. It achieves state-of-the-art
performance on EarthMind-Bench, surpassing GPT-4o despite being only 4B in
scale. Moreover, EarthMind outperforms existing methods on multiple public EO
benchmarks, showcasing its potential to handle both multi-granular and
multi-sensor challenges in a unified framework.