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7
Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial
Representation Learning
Colorado J Reed1,2*, Ritwik Gupta1*, Shufan Li1*,
Sarah Brockman3, Christopher Funk3, Brian Clipp3,
Kurt Keutzer1, Salvatore Candido2, Matt Uyttendaele2, Trevor Darrell1
1Berkeley AI Research;2Meta AI, FAIR;3Kitware Inc.
correspondence to ritwikgupta@berkeley.edu
Abstract
Large, pretrained models are commonly finetuned with
imagery that is heavily augmented to mimic different condi-
tions and scales, with the resulting models used for various
tasks with imagery from a range of spatial scales. Such
models overlook scale-specific information in the data for
scale-dependent domains, such as remote sensing. In this
paper, we present Scale-MAE , a pretraining method that ex-
plicitly learns relationships between data at different, known
scales throughout the pretraining process. Scale-MAE pre-
trains a network by masking an input image at a known input
scale, where the area of the Earth covered by the image deter-
mines the scale of the ViT positional encoding, not the image
resolution. Scale-MAE encodes the masked image with a
standard ViT backbone, and then decodes the masked image
through a bandpass filter to reconstruct low/high frequency
images at lower/higher scales. We find that tasking the net-
work with reconstructing both low/high frequency images
leads to robust multiscale representations for remote sensing
imagery. Scale-MAE achieves an average of a 2.4−5.6%
non-parametric kNN classification improvement across eight
remote sensing datasets compared to current state-of-the-art
and obtains a 0.9mIoU to 1.7mIoU improvement on the
SpaceNet building segmentation transfer task for a range of
evaluation scales.
1. Introduction
Remote sensing data is captured from satellites and planes
through a mixture of sensors, processing pipelines, and view-
ing geometries. Depending on the composition and relative
geometry of the sensor to the Earth, each image’s Ground
Sample Distance (GSD - the physical distance between two
*Denotes co-first authorship. Co-first authors will prioritize their names
on their resumes/websites.
Ground Truth Input Image Scale-MAE Vanilla MAE
Correct Incorrect0.3m GSD0.3m GSD
3.0m GSD3.0m GSDFigure 1. Scale-MAE learns better representations for multiscale
tasks compared to vanilla MAE. (Column 1) The top image spans
an area at 0.3m GSD and the bottom image shows the same region
at a coarser GSD. (Columns 2-4) The following columns show
a ground truth building segmentation, Scale-MAE segmentation
from a finetuned UperNet, and segmentation from an analogously
finetuned UperNet from a vanilla MAE, respectively. Scale-MAE
demonstrates better performance across images at both scales. See
the supplementary material for more examples.
adjacent pixels in an image) can vary from 0.3m to 1km, so a
100x100 pixel image could span anywhere from an Olympic-
size swimming pool (900 m2) to almost the entire country of
Jamaica (10,000 km2). The data within each image, and the
corresponding objects and points of interest, can therefore
vary across wide spatial ranges. Data from these multiscale
sensors provide critical and complementary information for
various operational and research applications in areas such
as atmospheric, hydrologic, agricultural, and environmental
monitoring [45, 52].
Few modern computer vision methods have explicitly ad-
dressed multiscale remote sensing imagery [35]. Neverthe-
less, the remote sensing vision community has increasingly
used large, pretrained models [13, 20], where such appli-
cations finetune a pretrained model for a single source ofarXiv:2212.14532v4 [cs.CV] 22 Sep 2023
Patchify + Mask
Resampled I
224px, .7m GSDResampled I