For the last year, OctoGEO team has been working on processing huge amount of satellite and aerial imagery and combining it with place names and street data. The result is a global map which makes an alternative to Google Maps and Google Earth — and is already used by small businesses as well as huge multinational companies and government institutions.
From raw data to usable product
Satellite images become an integral part of maps used in a variety of products. But the number of providers is limited and their terms of use often violate privacy, are restrictive in forms of use and the price tag is often significantly draining organizations’ budget.
Maps powered by open-data from European Space Agency satellites, hosted in a cloud or on your own server with unrestricted use and full control of privacy for your visitors.
The solution is near with open-data from European Space Agency and their imagery from Sentinel-2 satellites. But there is still a huge gap between raw data from sensors and usable product. According to one study, about 67 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by clouds during an average day. Therefore there is a need to select only the cloudless images or their parts and stitch them together. But this creates another issue: images taken in different parts of a day and in different seasons have different color toning, but the users want to see seamless transitions. Those and other challenges need to be solved first. A great work in this area has been done by a small team from the Austrian company EOX . The Czech team around OctoGEO s.r.o. is now moving it even further. It is now possible to use the satellite images directly in the end-users products.
Examples of final products ready for deployment can be found on MapTiler Cloud or at OpenMapTiles website.
Try the map in an interactive globe which runs directly in a web browser at WebGLEarth.com.
Moreover, the stack we developed can be adapted to other sources as well. Apart from imagery from ESA Copernicus Satellite program, we are working on an integration of EU INSPIRE geodata and other data sources into reliable web services and data formats directly usable by companies and institutions.
This means high-resolution images taken from the airplane or drones can be easily merged with the existing satellite layer to deliver great details.
Copernicus Masters
Copernicus Masters is an annual event for companies utilizing big data from space. Started in 2011 by AZO Space in behalf of ESA with the clear mission: award the most revolutionary acts in the fields of deep learning, smart mobility, big data analytics, internet of things and industry 4.0. The jury makes a rigorous selection in 14 different categories, where they judge innovativeness and beneficialness to the society. Each category has its own sponsor, who contribute the main prize, which helps further develop presented ideas. OctoGEO has presented his product in T-Systems Open Telekom Cloud Challenge.
The very first time in a history a Czech company won the Copernicus Masters award from ESA.
Copernicus Masters has been a huge success for our team as well as for the whole Czech Republic as this is the very first the prize is going there. It comes 7 years after the headquarter of Galileo, one of the most important projects of European space agency, moved to the capital of the Czech Republic, Prague. This move accelerated research in the field of space exploration in the whole country and also boosted whole industry connected to this area. OctoGEO is one of the start-ups who took the given opportunity.
