Feature Guided Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Learning in Remote
  Sensing
Yi Wang Hugo Hernández Hernández Conrad M Albrecht Xiao Xiang Zhu
Self-supervised learning guided by masked image modelling, such as Masked
AutoEncoder (MAE), has attracted wide attention for pretraining vision
transformers in remote sensing. However, MAE tends to excessively focus on
pixel details, thereby limiting the model's capacity for semantic
understanding, in particular for noisy SAR images. In this paper, we explore
spectral and spatial remote sensing image features as improved
MAE-reconstruction targets. We first conduct a study on reconstructing various
image features, all performing comparably well or better than raw pixels. Based
on such observations, we propose Feature Guided Masked Autoencoder (FG-MAE):
reconstructing a combination of Histograms of Oriented Graidents (HOG) and
Normalized Difference Indices (NDI) for multispectral images, and
reconstructing HOG for SAR images. Experimental results on three downstream
tasks illustrate the effectiveness of FG-MAE with a particular boost for SAR
imagery. Furthermore, we demonstrate the well-inherited scalability of FG-MAE
and release a first series of pretrained vision transformers for medium
resolution SAR and multispectral images.