Benchmarking AI for Critical Infrastructure Mapping

In this episode I caught up with Justin Guthrie to discuss Infra-Bench CLS, a global benchmark testing seven foundation model backbones on critical infrastructure classification using satellite imagery. We explore how the dataset combines OpenStreetMap labels with Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery, and what it takes to compare models with different input requirements using linear probing and fine-tuning.Justin explains the surprising result that DINOv3, pretrained on natural images, achieved the best overall performance in the benchmark, ahead of the Earth observation models tested. We also…