Satellite-based Environmental Analytics
Monitoring the effects of climate change through the application of high-resolution satellite imagery and sophisticated data analytics.
Project Overview
The Problem
Climate change, pollution, urbanization and natural disasters have accelerated the need to better monitor their impacts on our planet.
To understand the long-term impacts across vast areas, space-based images of earth are vital. Large collections of overlapping satellite images can be accurately merged together as mosaics to help understand how the earth’s landscape and ecosystem evolve over time. These mosaics provide vital data to help us understand the health of wetlands, forests and agricultural regions around the globe.
Mosaics for large areas tend to be constructed from low-resolution images. Producing high-quality mosaics for large areas is labour intensive and time consuming; they can take many months to build as they are often manually pieced together to create precise and seamless images that are cloud, shadow and artifact free.
How We Are Solving It
In response, EarthDaily Analytics is leading the Satellite-based Environmental Analytics project in partnership with Microsoft, BC Parks Foundation, the University of Victoria, Hatfield Consultants, BGC Engineering and Environment and Climate Change Canada. The team is building a system to automate and accelerate the generation of high-quality, analytics-ready mosaics using multiple sources of complex earth observation satellite data. The mosaicking process seamlessly combines images, eliminating satellite location errors and correcting for discrepancies in spectral content (i.e. colours) to ensure the final mosaic is ready for analytics.
These high-quality mosaics will be ready for use with environmental monitoring applications that leverage machine learning and augmented reality. This will give users the tools they need to quickly and accurately map wildlife areas, evaluate changes in land surfaces or manage ranges.
Once prototypes have been developed, the team plans to demonstrate their extensive capabilities to large-scale mapping and navigation enterprises, such as Uber, Google and Azure Maps. Organizations will be able to use this solution as an environmental monitoring tool, leading to improved environmental stewardship.
The Result
- Development of “EarthMosaics” (EMOS) service an on-demand image composite (mosaic) producer focused on Earth Observation data from small areas covering less than a single Sentinel-2 tile to spanning continents
- EMOS is an export product to global geospatial market and has seen new international customer relationships and sales
- Project got unexpected early customers: 3 separate sales of 36 mosaic products & provided real customer use cases
- EMOS products now embedded into EarthDaily Constellation
- Value-added services Hatfield Consultants and BGC Engineering for use with mosaic production, mosaic data
- UVic secured $1.4M of funding from NRC and DHGA (Digital Health Geospatial Analytics) to bolster its research work
- Project developed and produced over 17.9 TBs of mosaics in Microsoft’s Azure cloud
- • EarthMosaics created to help Ukrainian farmers assessing agriculture impact over large areas severely impacted
Project Lead
Project Partners
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“With the support of the Digital Supercluster, we are excited to announce the EarthMosaics Beta release, which allows us to scale up our customer base and support the growing demand for high-quality geospatial data to derive insights from the natural environment. By utilizing the power and flexibility of EarthMosaics to provide high-quality, customized, cloud-free imagery that is optimized for machine learning and AI at scale, our customers are accelerating their analytics capabilities and realizing the superior value proposition of the highly customizable EarthMosaics service offering.”
Vice President Engineering - EarthDaily Read the Beta Announcement (March 2022)