TEMPO: Global Temporal Building Density and Height Estimation from Satellite Imagery

We present TEMPO, a global, temporally resolved dataset of building density and height derived from high-resolution satellite imagery using deep learning models. We pair building footprint and height data from existing datasets with quarterly PlanetScope basemap satellite images to train a multi-task deep learning model that predicts building density and building height at a 37.6-meter per pixel resolution. We apply this model to global PlanetScope basemaps from Q1 2018 through Q2 2025 to create global, temporal maps of building density and height. We validate these maps by comparing against existing building footprint datasets. Our estimates achieve an F1 score between 85% and 88% on different hand-labeled subsets, and are temporally stable, with a 0.96 five-year trend-consistency score. TEMPO captures quarterly changes in built settlements at a fraction of the computational cost of comparable approaches, unlocking large-scale monitoring of development patterns and climate impacts essential for global resilience and adaptation efforts.

Optimizing Cloud-to-GPU Throughput for Deep Learning With Earth Observation Data

Training deep learning models on petabyte-scale Earth observation (EO) data requires separating compute resources from data storage. However, standard PyTorch data loaders cannot keep modern GPUs utilized when streaming GeoTIFF files directly from cloud storage. In this work, we benchmark GeoTIFF loading throughput from both cloud object storage and local SSD, systematically testing different loader configurations and data parameters. We focus on tile-aligned reads and worker thread pools, using Bayesian optimization to find optimal settings for each storage type. Our optimized configurations increase remote data loading throughput by 20x and local throughput by 4x compared to default settings. On three public EO benchmarks, models trained with optimized remote loading achieve the same accuracy as local training within identical time budgets. We improve validation IoU by 6-15% and maintain 85-95% GPU utilization versus 0-30% with standard configurations. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/pytorch-cloud-geotiff-optimization