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 highlyrepresentative high-resolution imagery. To remediate this, we introduce here the WorldStratified 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 (ESA) Phi-Lab as part of the ESA-funded QueryPlanet project, we curate nearly 10,000 km 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.