EarthLoc: Astronaut Photography Localization by Indexing Earth from Space

Astronaut photography, spanning six decades of human spaceflight, presents a unique Earth observations dataset with immense value for both scientific research and disaster response. Despite their significance, accurately localizing the geographical extent of these images, which is crucial for effective utilization, poses substantial challenges. Current, manual localization efforts are time-consuming, motivating the need for automated solutions. We propose a novel approach -leveraging image retrieval -to address this challenge efficiently. We introduce innovative training techniques which contribute to the development of a highperformance model, EarthLoc. We develop six evaluation datasets and perform a comprehensive benchmark comparing EarthLoc to existing methods, showcasing its superior efficiency and accuracy. Our approach marks a significant advancement in automating the localization of astronaut photography, which will help bridge a critical gap in Earth observations data. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/gmberton/EarthLoc .