Open High-Resolution Satellite Imagery: The WorldStrat Dataset -- With Application to Super-Resolution
Analyzing the planet at scale with satellite imagery and machine learning is
a dream that has been constantly hindered by the cost of difficult-to-access
highly-representative high-resolution imagery. To remediate this, we introduce
here the WorldStrat dataset. The largest and most varied such publicly
available dataset, at Airbus SPOT 6/7 satellites' high resolution of up to 1.5
m/pixel, empowered by European Space Agency's Phi-Lab as part of the ESA-funded
QueryPlanet project, we curate nearly 10,000 sqkm of unique locations to ensure
stratified representation of all types of land-use across the world: from
agriculture to ice caps, from forests to multiple urbanization densities. We
also enrich those with locations typically under-represented in ML datasets:
sites of humanitarian interest, illegal mining sites, and settlements of
persons at risk. We temporally-match each high-resolution image with multiple
low-resolution images from the freely accessible lower-resolution Sentinel-2
satellites at 10 m/pixel. We accompany this dataset with an open-source Python
package to: rebuild or extend the WorldStrat dataset, train and infer baseline
algorithms, and learn with abundant tutorials, all compatible with the popular
EO-learn toolbox. We hereby hope to foster broad-spectrum applications of ML to
satellite imagery, and possibly develop from free public low-resolution
Sentinel2 imagery the same power of analysis allowed by costly private
high-resolution imagery. We illustrate this specific point by training and
releasing several highly compute-efficient baselines on the task of Multi-Frame
Super-Resolution. High-resolution Airbus imagery is CC BY-NC, while the labels
and Sentinel2 imagery are CC BY, and the source code and pre-trained models
under BSD. The dataset is available at https://zenodo.org/record/6810792 and
the software package at https://github.com/worldstrat/worldstrat .