Today’s satellites are brainier than ever for real estate
The world revolves around GBD science
The best view is always from the top. This holds true for the constellation of satellites hurling millions of pixels in images down to earth every day.
In this age of breathtaking photography advancements, from drones and action cameras to submersible mobile phones, what has changed for an almost 60-year-old technology?
It turns out that deep learning, i.e. an advanced machine learning technique that develops multilayered mathematical structures to classify images, is changing the way computers interpret large sets of satellite data.
DigitalGlobe, a Colorado-based satellite imagery provider that supplies to such clients as Google Maps, is using a cloud-based, geospatial big data (GBD) platform to intelligently extract relevant images and points of interest from a vast compendium of above-earth photos.
More: India’s satellite success story
Called GBDX, the platform offers an infinite list of applications to stakeholders in real estate development patterns.
“The challenge is, how do you convert all those pixels into meaningful information?” Shay Har-Noy, DigitalGlobe’s vice president and general manager of platform, told Fast Company.
PSMA Australia, a consortium of government agencies that provides location data, has tasked DigitalGlobe to build Geoscape, a database of all the artificial structures around Australia.
Upon completion, Geoscape is projected to contain detailed info of more than 15 million structures on the face of the 7.6-million-square-kilometre continent. With data on everything from building height to rooftop materials, Geoscape could prove to be an indispensable tool in such areas as emergency planning, insurance risk modeling, and urban planning.
“It gives us the ability to look at things that are too large for the human eye to comprehend,” said James Crawford, founder and CEO of Orbital Insight, DigitalGlobe’s data analytics partner.
DigitalGlobe has five high-resolution satellites in orbit.
Read next: The folly and future of space real estate
Source: Property Report
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