“AlphaEarth Foundations functions like a virtual satellite,” the research team writes in their paper. “It accurately and efficiently characterizes the planet’s entire terrestrial land and coastal waters by integrating huge amounts of Earth observation data into a unified digital representation.”
The AI system reduces error rates by approximately 23.9% compared to existing approaches while requiring 16 times less storage space than other AI systems.
Rather than treating each satellite image as a separate piece of data, the system creates what researchers call “embedding fields” — highly compressed digital summaries that capture the essential characteristics of Earth’s surface in 10-meter squares.
