Finch: A Remote Sensing Dataset Management Framework

This paper describes an open-source dataset framework de-signed for machine learning remote sensing datasets called Finch after the finches Charles Darwin studied while devel-oping the theory of evolution. The Finch Framework enables datasets to be created from annotations-to-images and to ef-ficiently modify an existing dataset. Commonly, datasets are released once and never updated to become more challenging or to correct mistakes. Our proposed framework encourages datasets to evolve over time and provides a version control system for consistent comparisons between experiments. We utilize other open-source tools and unique attributes of re-mote sensing data to characterize entire datasets with a few lightweight configuration files. Generated datasets are ac-companied with a dataset manifest file, providing a consistent and powerful format for referencing all data. The standard dataset representation reduces the time required to integrate datasets into machine learning pipelines.