Assigning labels

Now that you know how to use Earth Index, let's learn how to actually assign labels.

Earth Index works through an iterative process, where users select a few tiles to show examples to the model. Using these, it can search across the entire region for other similar features. In order to find these, we need to assign labels to tiles.

How to approach labelling

Think about impactful positive and negative labels. For example, airport landing strips and roads can look similar. Airport landing strips, however, come to an abrupt end while most roads do not. Ensuring that you include positive/negative labels of this feature will help Earth Index learn the difference.

There is no perfect number of labels; you can try a small number of labels and see how good the outputs are. Based on the outputs from the “predictions” feature, refine your labeling process to move closer and closer to what you are looking for. Learn about predictions on the Running predictions page.

You should be able to see the number of labels, positive or negative, in the window on the top right.

Using Tools

Using the pointer, clicking will place a label, and clicking and dragging will move the map.

With the paint brush and eraser, clicking will place/remove a label, while clicking and dragging will assign/remove labels to all tiles underneath the brush. See below for an example of using the paint brush.

Keep in mind that more isn’t better; painting an entire geographic area is unlikely to improve results since it inputs similar data over and over. It won’t hurt the results, but it won’t be the most efficient use of Earth Index (or your time!)

Once you feel confident in assigning positive and negative labels, go to the next page to run predictions. You'll quickly see how this process is very iterative.