Europa: Increasing Accessibility of Geospatial Datasets.

In this paper we introduce a novel platform for teams to develop rich, analysis-ready datasets for geospatial machine learning. Europa(1) addresses longstanding challenges that remote sensing and machine vision researchers face when developing datasets, including data sourcing, dataset development and sharing. By simplifying and accelerating the dataset creation process, Europa serves to expedite the pace of geospatial machine learning innovation. The platform enables users to develop feature-rich, spatio-temporal datasets using multiple sources of satellite imagery. Europa supports the development of datasets for segmentation, classification, object detection, and change detection problems. Europa also enables collaborative dataset development, with a management protocol for crowdsourcing labels and annotations. The web interface and API are built upon a resilient dataset management protocol that supports versioning, forking and access control, enabling greater research collaboration.