TerraScope: Pixel-Grounded Visual Reasoning for Earth Observation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19039v1
• Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:38:02 GMT
• Title: TerraScope: Pixel-Grounded Visual Reasoning for Earth Observation
• Abstract summary: We introduce TerraScope, a unified vision-language model that delivers pixel-grounded geospatial reasoning.<n>We also propose TerraScope-Bench, the first benchmark for pixel-grounded geospatial reasoning.
• Score: 71.39112735716172
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in earth observation (EO), yet they struggle with tasks that require grounding complex spatial reasoning in precise pixel-level visual representations. To address this problem, we introduce TerraScope, a unified VLM that delivers pixel-grounded geospatial reasoning with two key capabilities: (1) modality-flexible reasoning: it handles single-modality inputs (optical or SAR) and adaptively fuses different modalities into the reasoning process when both are available; (2) multi-temporal reasoning: it integrates temporal sequences for change analysis across multiple time points. In addition, we curate Terra-CoT, a large-scale dataset containing 1 million samples with pixel-level masks embedded in reasoning chains across multiple sources. We also propose TerraScope-Bench, the first benchmark for pixel-grounded geospatial reasoning with six sub-tasks that evaluates both answer accuracy and mask quality to ensure authentic pixel-grounded reasoning. Experiments show that TerraScope significantly outperforms existing VLMs on pixel-grounded geospatial reasoning while providing interpretable visual evidence.

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