Contrastive ground-level image and remote sensing pre-training improves representation learning for natural world imagery

Multimodal image-text contrastive learning has shown that joint representations can be learned across modalities. Here, we show how leveraging multiple views of image data with contrastive learning can improve downstream fine-grained classification performance for species recognition, even when one view is absent. We propose ContRastive Image-remote Sensing Pre-training (CRISP)—a new pre-training task for ground-level and aerial image representation learning of the natural world—and introduce Nature Multi-View (NMV), a dataset of natural world imagery including >3 million ground-level and aerial image pairs for over 6,000 plant taxa across the ecologically diverse state of California. The NMV dataset and accompanying material are available at hf.co/datasets/andyvhuynh/NatureMultiView.