EarthNets: Empowering artificial intelligence for Earth observation

Earth observation (EO), aiming at monitoring the state of planet Earth using remote sensing data, is critical for improving our daily lives and living environment. With a growing number of satellites in orbit, an increasing number of datasets with diverse sensors and research domains are being published to facilitate the research of the remote sensing community. This paper presents a comprehensive review of more than 500 publicly published datasets, including research domains like agriculture, land use and land cover, disaster monitoring, scene understanding, vision-language models, foundation models, climate change, and weather forecasting. We systematically analyze these EO datasets from four aspects: volume, resolution distributions, research domains, and the correlation between datasets. Based on the dataset attributes, we propose to measure, rank, and select datasets to build a new benchmark for model evaluation. Furthermore, a new platform for EO, termed EarthNets, is released to achieve a fair and consistent evaluation of deep learning methods on remote sensing data. EarthNets supports standard dataset libraries and cutting-edge deep learning models to bridge the gap between the remote sensing and machine learning communities. Based on this platform, extensive deep-learning methods are evaluated on the new benchmark. The insightful results are beneficial to future research. The platform and dataset collections are publicly available at https://earthnets.github.io/.