๐ฅ Introducing BetaEarth - your own Earth embedding emulator [๐๐ซ๐-๐๐๐ฅ๐๐๐ฌ๐]
The past year has brought many notable embedding products, like AlphaEarth, TESSERA or OlmoEarth. We are entering a phase where embeddings begin to act as a substitute for real observation data.
BetaEarth is an attempt to explore how much one can learn from a model based on its embeddings alone, and whether those embeddings can serve as a useful training target for other models. Huge credit to the AlphaEarth team for releasing the embedding archive openly โ it's what made this kind of community-built extension possible.
BetaEarth is a flexible (and relatively lightweight) emulator of the AlphaEarth annual product. It doesn't reproduce AlphaEarth's exact outputs, nor the product, but it reaches ~0.87 cosine similarity on held-out data and retains 97% of downstream land-cover classification accuracy. It only took 1-2 days to train.
It can encode any combination (including multi-temporal) of: - Sentinel-2 L1C - Sentinel-2 L2A - Sentinel-1 RTC - COP-DEM 30 product
The model weights are open, just like its training data (built exclusively using Major TOM). The GitHub repository provides a script for automated generation of embeddings across any footprint. You can also try the workflow over small bounding boxes on the free Hugging Face web app!
This is a tiny (about 6 TB of data, but only 62,489 grid cells of ~100 sqkm) prototype dataset that allows to instantly connect existing Major TOM data with AlphaEarth embeddings.
I curated it to support several relevant research projects, but I figured it could help more people in the community to experiment and explore new applications of AlphaEarth.
๐๐ข๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง๐ฌ ๐๐จ๐ซ ๐๐ฌ๐ Each embedding sample comes from the original annual dataset produced by Google DeepMind. It means that, unlike samples from Sentinel-2 or Sentinel-1, it contains aggregated annual information from a particular year and is not linked to one particular observation. The existing Major TOM samples from physical sensors provide information potentially (and likely) contained in the AlphaEarth embedding sample, but they miss the temporal component represented within AEF embedding fields.
For more information, please check the dataset card on HuggingFace.
Today we release a prototype of COP-GEN - a universal generative model for Copernicus data. ๐๐๐-๐๐๐-๐๐๐ญ๐ is a model trained globally on the thumbnails of the Major TOM Core datasets, including Sentinel-2 L1C, Sentinel-2 L2A, Sentinel-1 RTC, and COP-DEM GLO-30.
How is it universal? COP-GEN learns a joint generative process of all modalities, which means that it can reconstruct data from any subset of present observations. ๐๐ข๐ญ๐ก๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐ญ๐ซ๐๐ข๐ง๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ฌ๐ฉ๐๐๐ข๐๐ข๐๐๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฒ to perform any of these tasks it can be used to approximate:
โ Sentinel-1 to Sentinel-2 translation
โ Elevation estimation from Sentinel-2 or Sentinel-1
โ Atmospheric Correction (L1C to L2A pipeline)
โ Atmospheric Generation (L2A to L1C)
โ ...and any other task involving translation between the supported modalities
On its own, the model can be used as a useful prior for estimating the data likelihood distribution for Copernicus data. COP-GEN-Beta learns joint, conditional, and marginal distributions within a single unified backbone, allowing to flexibly sample any modality given any condition.
Why is it Beta? Because thumbnails are a low-cost representation of the data that scales well and we managed to develop this prototype quite fast. We are currently developing the more costly COP-GEN model that supports the original data. For now, we wanted to showcase the prototype and make it available to the community for a test!
๐๐๐๐ ๐๏ธ ๐๐๐ฑ๐ญ-๐๐๐ฌ๐๐ ๐ญ๐๐ซ๐ซ๐๐ข๐ง ๐ ๐๐ง๐๐ซ๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐ฆ๐จ๐๐๐ฅ MESA is a novel generative model based on latent denoising diffusion capable of generating 2.5D representations (co-registered colour and depth maps) of terrains based on text prompt conditioning.
Work developed by Paul BorneโPons (@NewtNewt) during his joint internship at Adobe & ESA, and in collaboration with asterisk labs.