Does GPS Help AI See Better? Testing Location Encoders for Satellite Imagery

You’re looking at a satellite image. Green, trees, maybe a river. Forest? Farmland? Wetlands? Without knowing where this is, even a human would struggle. A pine forest in Sweden and a eucalyptus plantation in Brazil look nearly identical from 700 km up. This is the dirty secret of satellite image classification: pixels alone are not enough. A model that only looks at RGB channels has no concept of latitude, climate, or ecology. It has to guess whether a patch of green is Nordic taiga or Amazon rainforest based purely on texture. The obvious fix is to give the model GPS coordinates.