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GeoAI, or geospatial artificial intelligence, has become a trending topic and the frontier for spatial analytics in Geography. Although much progress has been made in exploring the integration of AI and Geography, there is yet no clear definition of GeoAI, its scope of research, or a broad discussion of how it enables new ways of problem solving across social and environmental sciences. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of GeoAI research used in large-scale image analysis, and its methodological foundation, most recent progress in geospatial applications, and comparative advantages over traditional methods. We organize this review of GeoAI research according to different kinds of image or structured data, including satellite and drone images, street views, and geo-scientific data, as well as their applications in a variety of image analysis and machine vision tasks. While different applications tend to use diverse types of data and models, we summarized six major strengths of GeoAI research, including (1) enablement of large-scale analytics; (2) automation; (3) high accuracy; (4) sensitivity in detecting subtle changes; (5) tolerance of noise in data; and (6) rapid technological advancement. As GeoAI remains a rapidly evolving field, we also describe current knowledge gaps and discuss future research directions.
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Towards practical artificial intelligence in Earth sciences
Abstract Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects are common and desired by many institutions and research teams, there are still relatively few success stories of AI in practical use for the Earth science community. Many AI practitioners in Earth science are trapped in the prototyping stage and their results have not yet been adopted by users. Many scientists are still hesitating to use AI in their research routine. This paper aims to capture the landscape of AI-powered geospatial data sciences by discussing the current and upcoming needs of the Earth and environmental community, such as what practical AI should look like, how to realize practical AI based on the current technical and data restrictions, and the expected outcome of AI projects and their long-term benefits and problems. This paper also discusses unavoidable changes in the near future concerning AI, such as the fast evolution of AI foundation models and AI laws, and how the Earth and environmental community should adapt to these changes. This paper provides an important reference to the geospatial data science community to adjust their research road maps, find best practices, boost the FAIRness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) aspects of AI research, and reasonably allocate human and computational resources to increase the practicality and efficiency of Earth AI research.
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- PAR ID:
- 10539157
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Computational Geosciences
- Volume:
- 28
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1420-0597
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1305-1329
- Size(s):
- p. 1305-1329
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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