Functional Map of the World
This dataset addresses the need for large-scale, annotated satellite imagery to advance machine learning in geospatial analysis, though it is incremental as it builds on existing data collection efforts.
The authors tackled the problem of predicting building and land use functions from satellite images by introducing the Functional Map of the World (fMoW) dataset, which includes over 1 million images with annotations across 63 categories and metadata features, and they provided baseline models for analysis.
We present a new dataset, Functional Map of the World (fMoW), which aims to inspire the development of machine learning models capable of predicting the functional purpose of buildings and land use from temporal sequences of satellite images and a rich set of metadata features. The metadata provided with each image enables reasoning about location, time, sun angles, physical sizes, and other features when making predictions about objects in the image. Our dataset consists of over 1 million images from over 200 countries. For each image, we provide at least one bounding box annotation containing one of 63 categories, including a "false detection" category. We present an analysis of the dataset along with baseline approaches that reason about metadata and temporal views. Our data, code, and pretrained models have been made publicly available.