GeoAI: spatially explicit artificial intelligence techniques for geographic knowledge discovery and beyond

Recent progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, the large-scale availability of high-quality data, as well as advances in both hardware and software to efficiently process these data, are transforming a range of fields from computer vision and natural language processing to autonomous driving and healthcare. For example, the availability of high-resolution geographic data and high-performance computing techniques together with deep learning fuel progress in fast and accurate object detection. Recent examples of GeoAI work include the detections of terrain features and densely-distributed building footprints, information extraction from scanned historical maps, semantic classification (e.g. LiDAR…