The last few years have seen a number of interesting developments involving satellites.  For instance, Planet Labs have developed a small, agile imaging satellite that allows swarms of satellites to orbit Earth, thus providing a better breadth and depth of coverage than more traditional imaging satellites.

Or you’ve got Orbital Insight, who are using satellites combined with AI to help us tackle things like deforestation.  It works by keeping an eye out for suspicious changes, such as new road building around forests for instance.  Once such changes have been spotted, an alert is published on the Global Forest Watch website, who are partnering with Orbital Insight.

Automated mapping

Now, a partnership consisting of Amazon, Nvidia, the venture arm of the CIA and satellite company DigitalGlobe are working on a system that can map the earth automatically from space.

Whilst the project is in an early stage, they have already released imagery covering the whole of Rio to a resolution of 50cm.  These images have then been tagged so that around 200,000 buildings have been identified.  These will then be used to train a machine learning algorithm to do this themselves in future.

The aim of the project is to eventually provide high-res impages of something like 500,000 sq.km of Earth, with a wide range of features annotated, in addition to the buildings it is capable of spotting today.

Zooming in

The images are already significantly sharper than those currently taken by NASA, which is limited to a resolution in the tens of meters.  The images will be made available via Amazon’s cloud service.

The company are bullish that with sufficient training, the software will be able to pick up a wide range of features, ranging from roads all the way down to things like park benches.  By taking pictures on a regular basis, they can easily monitor changes in an environment and even measure the materials used in areas such as shanty towns.

Whilst there are undoubtedly many potential benefits of the project, there are also various privacy concerns, especially with the CIA having an involvement.  Whilst there aren’t any indications that individuals will be captured in the images, public perceptions may be harder to manage.

One service that aims to assuage concerns is SpyMeSat, which aims to inform users when a satellite is flying overhead and is in a position to snap them.

The company specializes in the aerospace and intelligence industries, so they have a pedigree in the field.  At the moment, the data used by the app comes from a range of public sources, including the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

The app works by alerting each user when such a satellite is overhead and may potentially be snapping them.  It provides the user with a map that shows the movements of each satellite, together with a list of those that are nearby to their current location.

The user can then drill down to find out more about that satellite, including who owns it, who manufactured it and so on.