Is Self-Supervised Pre-training on Satellite Imagery Better than ImageNet? A Systematic Study with Sentinel-2

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has demonstrated significant potential in pre-training robust models with limited labeled data, making it particularly valuable for remote sensing (RS) tasks. A common assumption is that pre-training on domain-aligned data provides maximal benefits on downstream tasks, particularly when compared to ImageNet-pretraining (INP). In this work, we investigate this assumption by collecting GeoNet, a large and diverse dataset of global optical Sentinel-2 imagery, and pre-training SwAV and MAE on both GeoNet and ImageNet. Evaluating these models on six downstream tasks in the few-shot setting reveals that SSL pre-training on RS data offers modest performance improvements over INP, and that it remains competitive in multiple scenarios. This indicates that the presumed benefits of SSL pre-training on RS data may be overstated, and the additional costs of data curation and pre-training could be unjustified.

Recommended citation: Lahrichi, Saad, Zion Sheng, Shufan Xia, Kyle Bradbury, and Jordan Malof. "Is self-supervised pre-training on satellite imagery better than imagenet? a systematic study with sentinel-2." arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.10669 (2025).
Download Paper