融合遥感影像与矢量数据,构建面向人类活动的地理空间基础模型。
Spatial Representation Learning Beyond Pixels: Unifying Raster Data and Vector Semantics for Human-Centric Geospatial Foundation Models

- 提出统一嵌入空间中的联合空间表征学习框架
- 突破现有模型仅处理栅格数据的局限
- 适合从事地理信息智能、城市计算的研究者
地球观测(EO)已实现对环境过程与人类活动的全球尺度监测。近年来自监督学习推动了地球观测基础模型(EOFMs)的发展,利用海量未标注的EO数据学习可迁移的表征,适用于多种下游地理任务。然而,当前EOFMs仍局限于栅格模态,忽视了开放获取的矢量数据(如OpenStreetMap和Overture)所蕴含的丰富结构化信息。矢量数据以紧凑形式表达地理实体的几何、拓扑与语义关系,提供图像中难以获取的关键上下文信号。栅格数据反映连续的物理与光谱模式,而矢量数据则编码离散对象及其关系,更多体现人类系统(如社会或人口数据)。现有表征学习方法将二者割裂,依赖不完美且常有损的转换进行衔接。本文呼吁转向联合空间表征学习(SRL),在统一嵌入空间中整合栅格感知与矢量推理。基于多模态地理学习的进展,我们阐述概念基础、技术挑战与潜在方向,强调这种整合对于构建更准确、可解释、语义扎实的下一代地理空间AI系统至关重要。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Earth Observation (EO) has fundamentally transformed the monitoring of environmental processes and human activities up to planetary scale. Recent advances in self-supervised learning have given rise to Earth Observation Foundation Models (EOFMs), which leverage petabyte-scale unlabeled EO data to learn transferable representations across a wide range of downstream geospatial tasks. Despite these advances, current EOFMs remain largely confined to raster modalities, overlooking the rich, structured information encoded in openly-accessible vector data sources such as OpenStreetMap and Overture. Vector data provides explicit and compact representations of geographic entities, including geometry, topology, and semantic relationships, offering critical contextual signals that are often ambiguous or inaccessible in imagery alone. Raster and vector data thus represent complementary views of geographic space: raster data captures continuous physical and spectral patterns, while vector data encodes discrete objects and their relational structure and often represents more of the human rather than the physical systems (e.g. social or demographic data). However, existing geospatial representation learning paradigms treat these modalities in isolation, relying on imperfect and often lossy transformations to bridge them. This perspective paper calls for a paradigm shift toward joint Spatial Representation Learning (SRL) in an unified embedding space that integrate raster perception with vector-based reasoning. Building on emerging efforts in multimodal geospatial learning, we highlight conceptual foundations, technical challenges, and promising directions for aligning heterogeneous spatial data sources. We contend that such integration is essential for developing next-generation geospatial AI systems capable of more accurate, interpretable, and semantically grounded understanding of the Earth.
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