This study proposes a systematic framework for establishing ethical guidelines for GeoAI (Geospatial Artificial Intelligence), which integrates AI with spatial data science, GIS, and remote sensing. While general AI ethics have advanced through the OECD, UNESCO, and the EU AI Act, ethical standards tailored to GeoAI remain underdeveloped. Geospatial information exhibits unique characteristics, spatiality, contextuality, and spatial autocorrelation—and consequently entails distinct risks such as geo-privacy, spatial fairness and bias, data provenance and quality, and misuse prevention related to mapping and surveillance. Following PRISMA 2020, a systematic review of 32 recent international policy documents and peer-reviewed articles was conducted; through content analysis with intercoder reliability verification (Krippendorff’s α ≥ 0.76), GeoAI ethical principles were extracted and normalized. The analysis identified twelve ethical axes—Geo-privacy, Data Provenance and Quality, Spatial Fairness and Bias, Transparency, Accountability and Auditability, Safety (Security and Robustness), Human Oversight and Human-in-the-Loop, Public Benefit and Sustainability, Participation and Stakeholder Engagement, Lifecycle Governance, Misuse Prevention, and Inclusion and Accessibility—each accompanied by an operational guideline. These axes together form a practical framework that integrates universal AI ethics principles with spatially specific risks inherent in GeoAI and specifies actionable assessment points across the GeoAI lifecycle. The framework is intended for direct use as checklists and governance artifacts (e.g., model/data cards) and as procurement and audit criteria in academic, policy, and administrative settings.

Aerial images are an outstanding option for observing terrain with their high-resolution (HR) capability. The high operational cost of aerial images makes it difficult to acquire periodic observation of the region of interest. Satellite imagery is an alternative for the problem, but low-resolution is an obstacle. In this study, we proposed a context-based approach to simulate the 10 m resolution of Sentinel-2 imagery to produce 2.5 and 5.0 m prediction images using the aerial orthoimage acquired over the same period. The proposed model was compared with an enhanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR), which has excellent performance among the existing super-resolution (SR) deep learning algorithms, using the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and root-mean-squared error (RMSE). Our context-based ResU-Net outperformed the EDSR in all three metrics. The inclusion of the 60 m resolution of Sentinel-2 imagery performs better through fine-tuning. When 60 m images were included, RMSE decreased, and PSNR and SSIM increased. The result also validated that the denser the neural network, the higher the quality. Moreover, the accuracy is much higher when both denser feature dimensions and the 60 m images were used.

Road information high definition maps (HD map) contain information about the facilities around the roads and are often constructed through a mobile mapping system (MMS). Although constructing an HD map is essential for road maintenance and the application of autonomous driving in the future, it is problematic to acquire the data of objects other than the facilities in an unstructured form while operating the MMS. In this study, the researchers define this object data as clutter objects and present a method of automatic removal using characteristics of the MMS and image segmentation techniques. By applying the method to 10 KITTI (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago) datasets, clutter objects were removed with an average overall accuracy of 91% with 0% (0.448%) error of commission for the complete point cloud map.

A large amount of information needs to be identified and produced during the process of promoting projects of interest. Thermal infrared (TIR) images are extensively used because they can provide information that cannot be extracted from visible images. In particular, TIR oblique images facilitate the acquisition of information of a building’s facade that is challenging to obtain from a nadir image. When a TIR oblique image and the 3D information acquired from conventional visible nadir imagery are combined, a great synergy for identifying surface information can be created. However, it is an onerous task to match common points in the images. In this study, a robust matching method of image pairs combined with different wavelengths and geometries (i.e., visible nadir-looking vs. TIR oblique, and visible oblique vs. TIR nadir-looking) is proposed. Three main processes of phase congruency, histogram matching, and Image Matching by Affine Simulation (IMAS) were adjusted to accommodate the radiometric and geometric differences of matched image pairs. The method was applied to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images of building and non-building areas. The results were compared with frequently used matching techniques, such as scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), speeded-up robust features (SURF), synthetic aperture radar–SIFT (SAR–SIFT), and Affine SIFT (ASIFT). The method outperforms other matching methods in root mean square error (RMSE) and matching performance (matched and not matched). The proposed method is believed to be a reliable solution for pinpointing surface information through image matching with different geometries obtained via TIR and visible sensors.