Functional Map of the World Challenge

Intelligence analysts, policy makers, and first responders around the world rely on geospatial land use data to inform crucial decisions about global defense and humanitarian activities. Historically, analysts have manually identified and classified geospatial information by comparing and analyzing satellite images, but that process is time consuming and insufficient to support disaster response. The Functional Map of the World (fMoW) Challenge seeks to foster breakthroughs in the automated analysis of overhead imagery by harnessing the collective power of the global data science and machine learning communities. The challenge will publish one of the largest publicly available satellite-image datasets to date, with more than one million points of interest from around the world. The dataset contains satellite-specific metadata that researchers can exploit to build a competitive algorithm that classifies facility, building, and land use.