An Introduction to Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning

In terms of raw data, the earth observation industry is undeniably exploding. Investments in freely available data from satellite constellations like MODIS, Landsat, and Sentinel have democratized access to timely satellite imagery of the entire globe (albeit at a lower resolution than you're accustomed to seeing on Google Maps). Meanwhile, cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud have gone so far as to store satellite data for free, further accelerating global usage of these images. The trouble, naturally, is that interpreting the content of satellite imagery is not an easy task. In the field of remote sensing, researchers have been applying algorithmic techniques to the challenge of earth imagery interpretation for over 70 years.