Boris Babenko, Senior Software Engineer at Orbital Insight, presents the "Using Satellites to Extract Insights on the Ground" tutorial at the May 2017 Embedded Vision Summit.
Satellites are great for seeing the world at scale, but analyzing petabytes of images can be extremely time-consuming for humans alone. This is why machine vision is a perfect complement for satellite imagery: providing human-quality analysis at inhuman scale. This talk explains how different types of satellites are best suited to different types of observation and discusses applications of machine vision. Babenko looks at how this technology was able to not only detect previously unknown oil tanks in China, but also estimate how much oil the country stores in these tanks. He also looks at how simple metrics like car density and building density can be applied to both commercial and humanitarian applications. The talk concludes by examining the possibilities for the future as our ability to both take and process images continues to grow.
