
For decades, Earth observation satellites, aircraft, and more recently UAV platforms have been collecting increasing amounts of imagery of the Earth’s surface. With information about seasonal and long-term trends, remotely sensed imagery can be invaluable for solving some of the greatest challenges to humanity, including climate change adaptation, natural disaster monitoring, water resource management, and food security for a growing global population. From a computer vision perspective, this includes applications like land cover mapping (semantic segmentation), deforestation and flood monitoring (change detection), glacial flow (pixel tracking), hurricane tracking and intensity estimation (regression), and building and road detection (object detection, instance segmentation). By leveraging recent advancements in deep learning architectures, cheaper and more powerful GPUs, and petabytes of freely available satellite imagery datasets, we can come closer to solving these important problems.