

True color (left) and NDVI (right) of the Texas Hill Region, taken on November 16, 2018 by the Sentinel-2 satellite. In the NDVI image, red indicates water bodies, yellow indicates barren soil, light green indicates unhealthy vegetation, and dark green indicates healthy vegetation.

Benchmark datasets
One of the driving factors behind progress in computer vision is the existence of standardized benchmark datasets like ImageNet and MNIST. Using these datasets, researchers can directly compare the performance of different models and training procedures to determine which perform the best. In the remote sensing domain, there are many such datasets, but due to the aforementioned difficulties of working with this data and the lack of existing libraries for loading these datasets, many researchers opt to use their own custom datasets.