HyBiomass: Global Hyperspectral Imagery Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating Geospatial Foundation Models in Forest Aboveground Biomass Estimation

Comprehensive evaluation of geospatial foundation models (Geo-FMs) requires benchmarking across diverse tasks, sensors, and geographic regions. However, most existing benchmark datasets are limited to segmentation or classification tasks, and focus on specific geographic areas. To address this gap,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE geoscience and remote sensing letters Vol. 22; p. 1
Main Authors: Banze, Aaron, Stassin, Timothee, Braham, Nassim Ait Ali, Kuzu, Ridvan Salih, Besnard, Simon, Schmitt, Michael
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.01.2025
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Aboveground Biomass
Benchmark testing
Benchmarks
Biological system modeling
Biomass
Datasets
Ecosystem dynamics
EnMAP
Estimation
Forest biomass
Forestry
GEDI
Geospatial analysis
Geospatial Foundation Models
Hyperspectral Imagery
Hyperspectral imaging
Imagery
Laser radar
Remote Sensing
Satellites
Vegetation mapping
ISSN:1545-598X, 1558-0571
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Comprehensive evaluation of geospatial foundation models (Geo-FMs) requires benchmarking across diverse tasks, sensors, and geographic regions. However, most existing benchmark datasets are limited to segmentation or classification tasks, and focus on specific geographic areas. To address this gap, we introduce a globally distributed dataset for forest aboveground biomass (AGB) estimation, a pixel-wise regression task. This benchmark dataset combines co-located hyperspectral imagery (HSI) from the Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) satellite and predictions of AGB density estimates derived from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidars, covering seven continental regions. Our experimental results on this dataset demonstrate that the evaluated Geo-FMs can match or, in some cases, surpass the performance of a baseline U-Net, especially when fine-tuning the encoder. We also find that the performance difference between the U-Net and Geo-FMs depends on the dataset size for each region and highlight the importance of the token patch size in the Vision Transformer backbone for accurate predictions in pixel-wise regression tasks. By releasing this globally distributed hyperspectral benchmark dataset, we aim to facilitate the development and evaluation of Geo-FMs for HSI applications. Leveraging this dataset additionally enables research into geographic bias and generalization capacity of Geo-FMs.
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ISSN:1545-598X
1558-0571
DOI:10.1109/LGRS.2025.3610178