GeoAI for Large-Scale Image Analysis and Machine Vision: Recent Progress of Artificial Intelligence in Geography

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.