SatCLIP: Global, General-Purpose Location Embeddings with Satellite Imagery

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Hauptverfasser: Klemmer, Konstantin, Rolf, Esther, Robinson, Caleb, Mackey, Lester, Rußwurm, Marc
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Klemmer, Konstantin
Rolf, Esther
Robinson, Caleb
Mackey, Lester
Rußwurm, Marc
author_facet Klemmer, Konstantin
Rolf, Esther
Robinson, Caleb
Mackey, Lester
Rußwurm, Marc
contents Geographic information is essential for modeling tasks in fields ranging from ecology to epidemiology. However, extracting relevant location characteristics for a given task can be challenging, often requiring expensive data fusion or distillation from massive global imagery datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce Satellite Contrastive Location-Image Pretraining (SatCLIP). This global, general-purpose geographic location encoder learns an implicit representation of locations by matching CNN and ViT inferred visual patterns of openly available satellite imagery with their geographic coordinates. The resulting SatCLIP location encoder efficiently summarizes the characteristics of any given location for convenient use in downstream tasks. In our experiments, we use SatCLIP embeddings to improve prediction performance on nine diverse location-dependent tasks including temperature prediction, animal recognition, and population density estimation. Across tasks, SatCLIP consistently outperforms alternative location encoders and improves geographic generalization by encoding visual similarities of spatially distant environments. These results demonstrate the potential of vision-location models to learn meaningful representations of our planet from the vast, varied, and largely untapped modalities of geospatial data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_17179
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SatCLIP: Global, General-Purpose Location Embeddings with Satellite Imagery
Klemmer, Konstantin
Rolf, Esther
Robinson, Caleb
Mackey, Lester
Rußwurm, Marc
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
Geographic information is essential for modeling tasks in fields ranging from ecology to epidemiology. However, extracting relevant location characteristics for a given task can be challenging, often requiring expensive data fusion or distillation from massive global imagery datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce Satellite Contrastive Location-Image Pretraining (SatCLIP). This global, general-purpose geographic location encoder learns an implicit representation of locations by matching CNN and ViT inferred visual patterns of openly available satellite imagery with their geographic coordinates. The resulting SatCLIP location encoder efficiently summarizes the characteristics of any given location for convenient use in downstream tasks. In our experiments, we use SatCLIP embeddings to improve prediction performance on nine diverse location-dependent tasks including temperature prediction, animal recognition, and population density estimation. Across tasks, SatCLIP consistently outperforms alternative location encoders and improves geographic generalization by encoding visual similarities of spatially distant environments. These results demonstrate the potential of vision-location models to learn meaningful representations of our planet from the vast, varied, and largely untapped modalities of geospatial data.
title SatCLIP: Global, General-Purpose Location Embeddings with Satellite Imagery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17179