HOW AI COULD (REALLY) ENHANCE IMAGES FROM SPACE
In the world of satellite imagery, there are a few kinds of players: the picture-takers, the sense-makers, and those who are trying to do both. DigitalGlobe, with its ever-increasing cache of high-def history, is the planet's lead picture-taker; Orbital Insight is one of the frontrunning sense-makers. And today, the two companies announced a new multiyear, multipetabyte partnership. Orbital Insight, in other words, has the keys to the time machine.
The "why now" of this partnership has a simple answer: The Cloud.
DigitalGlobe put its entire archive, all 100 petabytes of it, onto an unmarked semi-truck and sent it to the cloud-based Amazon Web Services. Now, Orbital Insight can access and analyze the images where they are—on the web—rather than waiting for them to arrive.
On Orbital Insight's menu are more stores, for car-counting; more oil tanks, to estimate crude supply; more mapping of poverty, so organizations like the World Bank know where to focus; and more tracking of deforestation, so algorithms can tell NGOs where to say, "Stop!"
See the full story here; https://www.wired.com/story/how-ai-could-really-enhance-images-from-space/