Functional Map of the World

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Functional Map of the World dataset, a large-scale satellite imagery dataset with rich metadata aimed at advancing machine learning models for land use and building function prediction.

Contribution

It provides a new extensive dataset with annotations and metadata for satellite images, enabling research in functional land use classification.

Findings

Baseline models demonstrate the utility of metadata and temporal data.

Dataset covers over 1 million images from 200+ countries.

Publicly available data and models facilitate further research.

Abstract

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.