leveraging geospatial big data james crawford: with...

CASE STUDY www.digitalglobe.com/geobigdata

Leveraging Geospatial Big Data

with Artificial IntelligenceJames Crawford: THE VISIONARY BEHIND ORBITAL INSIGHT

CASE STUDY

LEVERAGING GEOSPATIAL BIG DATA WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE www.digitalglobe.com/geobigdata

The Visionary behind Orbital InsightJames Crawford, a former NASA robotics and

artificial intelligence expert who provided the agency

with broad AI support for spacecraft as well as Earth

observation satellites, has left his mark in outer

space and cyberspace as an AI visionary and savant.

Now he’s focused on planet Earth and how machine

learning can extract intelligence from Geospatial Big

Data (GBD). His new company is aptly called Orbital

Insight. Read on to learn how DigitalGlobe’s GBDX

platform is helping Crawford’s team deliver ground-

breaking insight into life on our planet.


Machine learning meets geospatial data

“I’ve been interested in space for a long time,” says

James Crawford, Founder and CEO of Orbital Insight.

“For years, space was largely a government operation.

It’s only in the last decade, that commercial space

has come into its own.”

As satellite technology became more and more advanced, Crawford recognized a unique opportunity: There were plenty of companies working on the

hardware to put cameras on satellites in space,

but few were developing the software to derive

meaning and insight from all the images that were

being collected. He founded Orbital Insight to bridge

that gap.

THE MAJOR TRENDS WE ARE BUILDING

OUR BUSINESS ON ARE THE INCREASING

AVAILABILITY OF EARTH IMAGERY AND THE

INCREASING POWER AND INTELLIGENCE

OF MACHINE VISION.

Today, Orbital Insight is leveraging the GBDX platform

from DigitalGlobe to understand our planet as never

before, using machine learning to turn high-resolution

satellite imagery into actionable intelligence.


Count the trees See the forest

Crawford often describes what Orbital Insight is

building as a macroscope: “The macroscope is a device

for seeing large-scale things—countries, continents,

the entire Earth—while still seeing the detail. Our

algorithms can calculate the number of chlorophyll

atoms in each corn plant, but still see the entire

corn-belt. They can count the number of cars in each

Target parking lot and still see the United States.”

Seeing the forest and the trees at the same time lets

Orbital Insight track trends in extreme detail and at

scale. It means gaining a better grasp of global issues

like migration and deforestation and an objective way

to characterize socio-economic trends. It also means

working with a million images at a time. “If you have

images of China every month for the last five years,

you should be able to understand which cities are

growing,” says Crawford. “Deep learning and AI

actually make it possible to do that because we

automate the process.” But, as Crawford points out,

they need a pipeline that lets them access and analyze

geospatial big data. Orbital Insight’s choice:

the cloud-based GBDX platform.


GBDX: the pipeline to insight

“So we go from a million satellite images to a million

numbers,” Crawford says, “but that big array does not

tell you Walmart is going to have a great quarter. It

takes a very smart data scientist who can take a

million numbers and do the statistical analysis that

boils those numbers down to plain English.” Crawford

cites Black Friday projections as an example. While

retailers will wait until February for official analyses,

reporters who had toured a handful of malls on Black

Friday declared sales to be disappointing. Orbital

Insight disagrees. “We were able to process all the

(parking lot) imagery from DigitalGlobe from Thursday,

Friday, Saturday and Sunday,” counters Crawford.

“We had it fully processed Monday night. We think that

Black Friday was actually up from 2014.”

“The GBDX platform lets us take a million images in

the cloud and get them into our buckets on Amazon

Web Services,” Crawford notes. “Then it takes

scalable cloud computing where we can make very

heavy use of graphical processing units, because

much of our processing is done using convolutional

neural networks.”

This isn’t the first time Crawford has leveraged cloud

computing in innovative ways. As Engineering

Director of Google Book Search, he used AI techniques

in the cloud to scale up to the exabyte level for

processing millions of pages of digitized books. With

GBDX, Crawford brings the same approach to

geospatial data, exploring how Orbital Insight can

automate and compute at an unprecedented scale.


Overcoming challenges Measuring things—most of which have never been

measured before—carries with it some challenges.

According to Crawford: “In almost every application we

do, we always want more imagery.” With GBDX, Orbital

Insight has on-demand access to DigitalGlobe’s

archive of more than 80 petabytes of imagery, which

grows by over 3,000,000 sq km of new imagery every

day. For retail chain studies, they pull every available

image from the library—both current and historical.

Orbital Insight can rent the data, avoiding the high

costs that purchasing imagery would require.

Quantity matters, but so does quality. As Crawford

told Earth Imaging Journal, “The resolution of imagery

today varies. If you use DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3

images, you have 30-centimeter resolution and really

nice optics.” The WorldView-3 satellite was launched

in August 2014 and made 30-centimeter resolution

commercially available for the first time. “With a

WorldView-3 image” Crawford noted, “you really could

tell the difference between a car, a van and a truck.”

Satellite imagery is the foundation for Orbital Insight’s

process but they frequently pull in a variety of other

data sets. “We have an application where we are

forecasting corn yield in the United States,” says

Crawford. “For that application, we unify the satellite

point of view with what we call the normalized

vegetative index—NDVI. This is a ratio of the near-

infrared and the red [spectral bands] which gives us a

satellite-based metric of how healthy the corn is.”

To complete the predictive model, they include

temperature, humidity, and rainfall data collected

by ground stations. For agricultural applications such

as corn yield, Crawford and his team leverage open

sourced 15-meter Landsat data provided by the US

government, which is easily available within the

GBDX platform.

But whether Orbital Insight counts corn or cars,

working at this unprecedented scale makes it difficult

to validate their results. Reflecting on the retail

parking lot project, Crawford explains: “We have five

years of satellite imagery from the archive so we can

look at car counts. We can compare those to sales, but

none of the retailers actually report the number of

cars in their parking lots.” He adds that shoppers

rarely spend the same amount of money every time

they shop and that few retailers track foot traffic. “Our

biggest challenges have always been that we want

more images,” Crawford says, “and when we get them,

we need to accurately assess how good the numbers

are [and] convince our customers how accurate they

are.” It requires the right combination of machine

vision scientists, data scientists, and market experts

to accurately measure objects, understand the

correlation to economic indicators, and turn that into a

product the market needs. Crawford prides himself on

having built a team with the right talent to maximize

their macroscope.


HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGERY

MULTISPECTRAL IMAGERY

DIGITAL ELEVATION MODELS

PARTNER ALGORITHMS

DIGITALGLOBE ALGORITHMS

CROWDSOURCING

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT

Macroscope to insight


Rethinking possible

Orbital Insight is tackling some of the world’s most

pressing problems, both humanitarian and commercial.

Customers include government agencies, nonprofits,

hedge funds, and Fortune 500 companies. In November

2015, Crawford addressed corporate and government

decision-makers at McKinsey & Company’s Global

Infrastructure Initiative. He urged them to think of

satellites as a different kind of infrastructure and

described how geospatial big data could help them

understand the world at scale.

Crawford cited Orbital Insight’s collaboration with the

World Bank to map global poverty. In the poorest

countries, data on where poverty exists is inevitably

out-of-date. It’s also difficult to collect by sending out

people with clipboards. To address this challenge,

Orbital Insight is using four satellite-based metrics

that correlate with poverty: agricultural productivity,

car density, building density, and building height.

Their goal is to leverage these metrics to identify and

quantify poverty at a country-wide scale.

Crawford also talked about bringing transparency to

the chaotic oil market. He noted that no one knows

how much crude oil is stored in more than 18,000 tanks

all over the world. When demand goes down in China

and the world economy slows, it takes weeks for the

International Energy Agency to issue a report.

Crawford intends to provide real-time insight with

satellite imagery where the quantity of oil in floating

oil tanks is visible and can be calculated. By

monitoring a statistically significant number of tanks

worldwide, Orbital Insight can track oil supplies and

help stabilize the market.


Inspired by what’s ahead

Crawford speaks with passion about his young

company’s future: “There are three things I find

inspirational. The number of different ways we can use

this macroscope concept productively. The number of

conversations we can have. And the number of

visionary projects we can do in a variety of industries. I

think it inspires everybody in the company every day.”

Crawford illustrates the potential for predictive insight

with the challenge of global deforestation. He

suggests that determining what areas are at risk is

the best way to get ahead of the problem. Crawford

recommends using low-resolution satellite imagery to

identify where deforestation has occurred, then

pulling high-resolution imagery to look for activities

like road building and logging camps. By correlating

these precursors to deforestation with already

affected areas, he hopes to better understand how to

use current imagery to produce a risk map, a project he

is currently working on with the World Resources

Institute.

From tracking trends to monitoring and managing

change, Orbital Insight wants to solve complex

problems—at the speed of business. Has snowy

weather diverted business from shopping malls to the

Internet? Can insurance companies accurately

measure wildfire risk? How can far-flung energy

companies track their pipelines and infrastructure?

To help answer questions like these, Crawford

envisions increased coverage of our planet by

satellites, producing more imagery and even better

resolution. He also sees integration with other kinds of

geospatial data coming out of the Internet of Things.

Crawford anticipates being able to link with things like

“cellphone pings and connected cars…integrating that

with the satellite data to give an ongoing objective

picture of all kinds of socio-economic trends.”


How can you leverage GBDX?GBDX is revolutionizing how developers and data

scientists think about Geospatial Big Data. The work

done by Orbital Insight is leading the way in discover-

ing applications in a broad range of industries, gov-

ernments and non-profits.

Imagine what you could do with DigitalGlobe’s massive

library of more than 15 years of satellite imagery that

grows more than 3,000,000 sq km every day.

The GBDX platform gives you on-demand, cloud-based

access to as much data as you need to run advanced

algorithms that can extract meaning and insight. A

platform where you can import your own algorithms or

use one of ours. A platform with API integration and

easy geo-computation through Amazon Web Services.

A platform that is available with support from the

DigitalGlobe team of scientists and experts, if you

need it.

DATA NOT PICTURES

P U T G EO S PAT I A L B IG DATA T O W O R K O N YO U R T O U G H E S T P R O B L E M S


ACC E S S T H E MOS T COM P R E H EN SI V E L IBR A RY OF E A R T H IM AGE RY.DigitalGlobe owns and operates the most agile and

sophisticated constellation of commercial Earth

imaging satellites in the world, amassing more than

3,000,000 sq km of Earth imagery daily. In fact,

DigitalGlobe has collected 80 percent of all the Earth

imagery collected since 2010. Our massive library is

yours to explore for current and historical imagery.

L E V E R AGE A L IBR A RY OF A L GORI T H M S —W I T H MOR E BEING BUILT E V E RY DAY.GBDX is a robust environment for building, accessing,

and running advanced algorithms designed for

information extraction from imagery datasets at scale.

Accessible through our APIs, current algorithms

include car counting, orthorectifying, land use, land

cover, and atmospheric compensation. These

algorithms are being built by both DigitalGlobe and

third-party developers.

E A SILY DE V EL OP A P P L IC AT ION S W I T H A P I IN T EGR AT ION.REST APIs access and control the various elements

of the GBDX environment, including data discovery,

staging of working sets, and workflow orchestration.

Actions are performed by exchanging representations

in JSON format. The platform’s API uses the standard

HTTP request methods: GET, POST, and DELETE.

» Catalog API lets you search and discover data via a set of 39 different attributes associated with each image. This includes standard image characteristics such as geographic location, cloud cover percentage, sensor type, sun angle, and many others.

» Workflow API provides tools for managing imagery data and executing tasks against sets of data. Once you find data by using the Catalog API, the Workflow API lets you assign the selected dataset to a working set and then launch individual tasks/algorithms.

Unprecedented power at a reasonable costThe GBDX platform provides the ideal ecosystem for

you to create new customer solutions without the

cost of owning and operating costly data and IT

infrastructure. You can build new applications, or

extend existing ones, by leveraging the GBDX

capabilities and embedding them in customer-

acing interfaces. You get: » Access to algorithms, image data, and compute

infrastructure coupled with new business models that allow for broad scale geo-analysis

» Developer-friendly pricing to enable the creation of new products and services

» Short-term rental of image data that enables project execution at a low cost

» Access to a broad selection of industry tools that advance your product and project goals and provide opportunities for new passive revenue streams

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