Multimodal Artificial Intelligence for High-Resolution Urban Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

Cities play critical roles in achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. Cities are shaped by interactions among infrastructure, human activity, and environmental conditions. Rapid advances in remote sensing and artificial intelligence are providing new opportunities to understand and model complex urban environments.

The increasing availability of satellite, aerial, street-level, and multimodal geospatial data enables the large-scale monitoring of urban morphology, land use, energy, emissions, mobility, and environmental dynamics. Meanwhile, foundation models, generative AI, world models, LLMs, and agentic AI are extending conventional remote sensing from perception and prediction toward generation, reasoning, and decision making.

This Special Issue will present and disseminate the most recent advances related to artificial intelligence for urban remote sensing, covering multimodal perception, modeling, prediction, generation, planning, and decision making. We welcome methodological and application-oriented studies that directly use remote sensing or geospatial data to address urban and environmental challenges.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Multi-modal AI for remote sensing;
• Remote sensing for sustainable development;
• Remote sensing datasets, benchmarks, and real-world applications;
• Agentic AI for smart cities;
• City digital twins, spatial–temporal modeling simulation and world models;
• Remote sensing image understanding and change detection;
• Vision-language models and remote sensing question answering;
• Human and vehicle mobility;
• Foundation models for remote sensing;
• Generative AI and data generation

Dr. Kailai Sun
Dr. Irfan Qaisar
Dr. Heye Huang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.