CROSS-MODAL EARTH OBSERVATION RETRIEVAL

EARTHZI

One satellite sees the Earth in radar. Another sees it in light. EARTHZI learns to recognise the same ground beneath both — retrieving the matching Sentinel-1 SAR or Sentinel-2 optical scene for any query, in either direction.

THE PROBLEM

Two sensors, one Earth

Synthetic Aperture Radar penetrates cloud and night, but reads like noise to the eye. Optical imagery is intuitive, but useless after dark or under cloud. EARTHZI bridges the two — matching a radar patch to its optical counterpart, and back again, by embedding both into a shared space.

A fine-tuned RemoteCLIP model is trained with contrastive learning on paired Sentinel-1 / Sentinel-2 patches — pulling true geographic pairs together in embedding space, and pushing everything else apart.

At inference, a single query image is embedded and compared by cosine similarity against a pre-computed gallery, returning the five closest matches with rank and score.

Evaluated across 4,000 queries in both directions, on a held-out test split.

35.7%
RANK@1 · OPTICAL → SAR
32.5%
RANK@1 · SAR → OPTICAL
68.7%
RECALL@5 · OPTICAL → SAR
63.9%
RECALL@5 · SAR → OPTICAL
CAPABILITIES

What EARTHZI does

Four capabilities, built around one shared embedding space.

C-BAND → VNIR

SAR → Optical

Upload a Sentinel-1 radar patch and retrieve the optical scene of the same location — useful when the only available imagery is radar.

VNIR → C-BAND

Optical → SAR

Upload a Sentinel-2 optical patch and retrieve the matching radar acquisition — the higher-performing direction at 35.7% Rank@1.

MODEL

Fine-tuned RemoteCLIP

A remote-sensing-adapted CLIP backbone, contrastively fine-tuned on paired SAR–optical patches to align both modalities in one space.

OUTPUT

Top-5 Ranked Matches

Every query returns its five nearest neighbours by cosine similarity, each with filename, similarity score, and rank position.

PIPELINE

From query to match

STAGE 01 INPUT

Upload a patch

A SAR or optical image patch is submitted, along with the desired retrieval direction.

STAGE 02 ENCODE

Generate embedding

The fine-tuned RemoteCLIP encoder maps the image to a vector in the shared SAR–optical embedding space.

STAGE 03 COMPARE

Cosine similarity search

The query vector is compared against every pre-computed gallery embedding from the opposite modality.

STAGE 04 RETRIEVE

Return top-5

The five closest matches are returned with rank, filename, and similarity score — rendered below.

DROP IMAGE OR CLICK TO UPLOAD
TRY IT

Run a live retrieval

Upload a Sentinel-1 or Sentinel-2 patch, choose the retrieval direction, and EARTHZI will return its top-5 cross-modal matches with similarity scores.

Connects to POST /search on the EARTHZI inference backend.

BUILT ON

Data, model & context

DATA SOURCE
Sentinel-1 & Sentinel-2
MODEL LINEAGE
RemoteCLIP, fine-tuned
EVALUATION
4,000 paired queries
RETRIEVAL
Bi-directional, top-5

Keep It Free, Keep It Growing

Our services will always be free.
Donations help us improve, maintain, and expand them for everyone.

EARTHZI is developed by researchers and engineers dedicated to democratising satellite imagery analysis for science and society.