ISS-Geo142: A Benchmark for Geolocating Astronaut Photography from the International Space Station

arXiv:2504.21194v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: This paper introduces ISS-Geo142, a curated benchmark for geolocating astronaut photography captured from the International Space Station (ISS). Although the ISS position at capture time is known precisely, the specific Earth locations depicted in these images are typically not directly georeferenced, making automated localization non-trivial. ISS-Geo142 consists of 142 images with associated metadata and manually determined geographic locations, spanning a range of spatial scales and scene types.
On top of this benchmark, we implement and evaluate three geolocation pipelines: a neural network based approach (NN-Geo) using VGG16 features and cross-correlation over map-derived Areas of Interest (AOIs), a Scale-Invariant Feature Transform based pipeline (SIFT-Match) using sliding-window feature matching on stitched high-resolution AOIs, and TerraByte, an AI system built around a GPT-4 model with vision capabilities that jointly reasons over image content and ISS coordinates. On ISS-Geo142, NN-Geo achieves a match for 75.52% of the images under our evaluation protocol, SIFT-Match attains high precision on structurally rich scenes at substantial computational cost, and TerraByte establishes the strongest overall baseline, correctly geolocating approximately 90% of the images while also producing human-readable geographic descriptions.
The methods and experiments were originally developed in 2023; this manuscript is a revised and extended version that situates the work relative to subsequent advances in cross-view geo-localization and remote-sensing vision–language models. Taken together, ISS-Geo142 and these three pipelines provide a concrete, historically grounded benchmark for future work on ISS image geolocation.