The emergence of large-scale large language models, with GPT-4 as a prominent
example, has significantly propelled the rapid advancement of artificial
general intelligence and sparked the revolution of Artificial Intelligence 2.0.
In the realm of remote sensing (RS), there is a growing interest in developing
large vision language models (VLMs) specifically tailored for data analysis in
this domain. However, current research predominantly revolves around visual
recognition tasks, lacking comprehensive, large-scale image-text datasets that
are aligned and suitable for training large VLMs, which poses significant
challenges to effectively training such models for RS applications. In computer
vision, recent research has demonstrated that fine-tuning large vision language
models on small-scale, high-quality datasets can yield impressive performance
in visual and language understanding. These results are comparable to
state-of-the-art VLMs trained from scratch on massive amounts of data, such as
GPT-4. Inspired by this captivating idea, in this work, we build a high-quality
Remote Sensing Image Captioning dataset (RSICap) that facilitates the
development of large VLMs in the RS field. Unlike previous RS datasets that
either employ model-generated captions or short descriptions, RSICap comprises
2,585 human-annotated captions with rich and high-quality information. This
dataset offers detailed descriptions for each image, encompassing scene
descriptions (e.g., residential area, airport, or farmland) as well as object
information (e.g., color, shape, quantity, absolute position, etc). To
facilitate the evaluation of VLMs in the field of RS, we also provide a
benchmark evaluation dataset called RSIEval. This dataset consists of
human-annotated captions and visual question-answer pairs, allowing for a
comprehensive assessment of VLMs in the context of RS.

大规模语言模型的出现显著推动了人工智能的快速发展，并引发了人工智能 2.0 的革命。远程感知领域对于开发专门针对数据分析的大规模视觉语言模型越来越感兴趣。然而，目前的研究主要集中在视觉识别任务上，缺乏对齐并适用于训练大规模视觉语言模型的全面、大规模图像 - 文本数据集，这对于有效训练此类模型构成了重大挑战。本研究构建了一个高质量的远程感知图像字幕数据集（RSICap），用于促进 RS 领域大规模视觉语言模型的发展。与以往通过模型生成的字幕或简短描述的数据集不同，RSICap 包括 2,585 个人工注释的字幕，具备丰富和高质量的信息。该数据集为每个图像提供了详细的描述，包括场景描述（例如居住区、机场或农田）以及对象信息（例如颜色、形状、数量、绝对位置等）。为了促进在 RS 领域中对视觉语言模型的评估，我们还提供了一个基准评估数据集 RSIEval，它包括人工注释的字幕和视觉问答对，可以全面评估在 RS 背景下的视觉语言模型。