Geolocating Earth Imagery from ISS: Integrating Machine Learning with Astronaut Photography for Enhanced Geographic Mapping

This paper presents a novel approach to geolocating images captured from the International Space Station (ISS) using advanced machine learning algorithms. Despite having precise ISS coordinates, the specific Earth locations depicted in astronaut-taken photographs often remain unidentified. Our research addresses this gap by employing three distinct image processing pipelines: a Neural Network based approach, a SIFT based method, and GPT-4 model. Each pipeline is tailored to process high-resolution ISS imagery, identifying both natural and man-made geographical features. Through extensive evaluation on a diverse dataset of over 140 ISS images, our methods demonstrate significant promise in automated geolocation with varied levels of success. The NN approach showed a high success rate in accurately matching geographical features, while the SIFT pipeline excelled in processing zoomed-in images. GPT-4 model provided enriched geographical descriptions alongside location predictions. This research contributes to the fields of remote sensing and Earth observation by enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of geolocating space-based imagery, thereby aiding environmental monitoring and global mapping efforts.

@article{srivastava2025_2504.21194,
  title={ Geolocating Earth Imagery from ISS: Integrating Machine Learning with Astronaut Photography for Enhanced Geographic Mapping },
  author={ Vedika Srivastava and Hemant Kumar Singh and Jaisal Singh },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.21194},
  year={ 2025 }
}