Background

“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.” [IARPA]

Dataset

The fMoW dataset contains ~3.5TB of 4-band and 8-band multispectral images in TIFF format. There is also a RGB version of the dataset available in JPEG format, with all multispectral imagery converted to RGB. Figure 1 shows the categories in the dataset and the number of instances in each category.

The dataset is available for download from AWS or using BitTorrent. To download from AWS, the following AWS CLI can be used:

aws s3 ls s3://spacenet-dataset/Hosted-Datasets/fmow/fmow-full/
aws s3 ls s3://spacenet-dataset/Hosted-Datasets/fmow/fmow-rgb/

To download using BitTorrent, refer to the instructions here.

Our Solution