Pixel-Level Transformers in Remote Sensing: A Canopy Height Case Study

arXiv:2609.37809v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting canopy height from medium-resolution satellite imagery is a common and scalable approach for assessing the condition of the world's forests, which play a crucial role in climate change mitigation. While Transformer-based architectures have shown strong performance in many domains, their straightforward application to dense (i.e., pixel-level) regression tasks often yields suboptimal results. In particular, the patch size has a crucial impact on the model performance. In this work, we consider pixel-level attention schemes and show that the resulting models generally outperform those relying on larger patch sizes. However, pixel-level attention can be a prohibitively resource-intensive operation. For this reason, we conduct an extensive experimental study using efficient attention variants to identify favorable trade-offs between prediction quality and resource requirements, facilitating the practical deployment of the proposed models. In addition, we perform a comprehensive comparison with several well-established models in the field and show that, with suitable hyperparameter choices, Transformer-based architectures can outperform competing approaches. Our findings provide practical guidance for designing models for pixel-level regression tasks on medium-resolution satellite imagery, including canopy height and biomass estimation, soil moisture mapping, and yield forecasting.

Abstract:Predicting canopy height from medium-resolution satellite imagery is a common and scalable approach for assessing the condition of the world's forests, which play a crucial role in climate change mitigation. While Transformer-based architectures have shown strong performance in many domains, their straightforward application to dense (i.e., pixel-level) regression tasks often yields suboptimal results. In particular, the patch size has a crucial impact on the model performance. In this work, we consider pixel-level attention schemes and show that the resulting models generally outperform those relying on larger patch sizes. However, pixel-level attention can be a prohibitively resource-intensive operation. For this reason, we conduct an extensive experimental study using efficient attention variants to identify favorable trade-offs between prediction quality and resource requirements, facilitating the practical deployment of the proposed models. In addition, we perform a comprehensive comparison with several well-established models in the field and show that, with suitable hyperparameter choices, Transformer-based architectures can outperform competing approaches. Our findings provide practical guidance for designing models for pixel-level regression tasks on medium-resolution satellite imagery, including canopy height and biomass estimation, soil moisture mapping, and yield forecasting.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.37809 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.37809v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.37809 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Pixel-Level Transformers in Remote Sensing: A Canopy Height Case Study

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