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arXiv · 2510.17914

NeuCo-Bench: A Novel Benchmark Framework for Neural Embeddings in Earth Observation

Rikard Vinge·Isabelle Wittmann·Jannik Schneider·Michael Marszalek·Luis Gilch·Thomas Brunschwiler·Conrad M Albrecht
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Abstract

We introduce NeuCo-Bench, a novel benchmark framework for evaluating (lossy) neural compression and representation learning in the context of Earth Observation (EO). Our approach builds on fixed-size embeddings that act as compact, task-agnostic representations applicable to a broad range of downstream tasks. NeuCo-Bench comprises three components: (i) an evaluation pipeline built around embeddings, (ii) a challenge mode with a hidden-task leaderboard designed to mitigate pretraining bias, and (iii) a scoring system that balances accuracy and stability. To support reproducibility, we release SSL4EO-S12-downstream, a curated multispectral, multitemporal EO dataset. We present results from a public challenge at the 2025 CVPR EARTHVISION workshop and conduct ablations with state-of-the-art foundation models. NeuCo-Bench provides a step towards community-driven, standardized evaluation of neural embeddings for EO and beyond.

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Rikard Vinge, Isabelle Wittmann, Jannik Schneider, Michael Marszalek, Luis Gilch, Thomas Brunschwiler, Conrad M Albrecht. 2026-03-13. NeuCo-Bench: A Novel Benchmark Framework for Neural Embeddings in Earth Observation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17914

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