Remote Sensing (RS) is a crucial technology for observing, monitoring, and interpreting our planet, with broad applications across geoscience, economics, humanitarian fields, etc. While artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning, has achieved significant advances in RS, unique challenges persist in developing more intelligent RS systems, including the complexity of Earth's environments, diverse sensor modalities, distinctive feature patterns, varying spatial and spectral resolutions, and temporal dynamics. Meanwhile, recent breakthroughs in large Foundation Models (FMs) have expanded AI's potential across many domains due to their exceptional generalizability and zero-shot transfer capabilities. However, their success has largely been confined to natural data like images and video, with degraded performance and even failures for RS data of various non-optical modalities. This has inspired growing interest in developing Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs) to address the complex demands of Earth Observation (EO) tasks, spanning the surface, atmosphere, and oceans. This survey systematically reviews the emerging field of RSFMs. It begins with an outline of their motivation and background, followed by an introduction of their foundational concepts. It then categorizes and reviews existing RSFM studies including their datasets and technical contributions across Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), Visual-Language Models (VLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and beyond. In addition, we benchmark these models against publicly available datasets, discuss existing challenges, and propose future research directions in this rapidly evolving field.

本研究探讨了遥感领域面临的重要挑战，特别是在复杂的地球环境和多样的传感器模态下的发展需求。文章提出了遥感基础模型（RSFM）的概念，并系统地回顾了现有的研究，评估了这些模型的性能及其对地球观测任务的潜在影响，为未来研究方向提供了指导。

遥感与地球观测的基础模型：综述