AI Applications for Satellite Imagery or Satellite Images Dataset

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VSINGHBISEN

5 min readJul 29, 2020

Satellite images can capture the wide-angle viewing area from the distant height making it easier for artificial intelligence applicable to various fields.

And AI applications using the satellite images can learn to predict various scenarios after analyzing the situation from satellite imagery datasets that are specially created for AI models.

And to train such models a huge amount of training data set are required through machine learning or deep learning algorithms. These satellite images data includes different types of Aerial views of various things like agricultural fields, forest, cities for urban planning and management and various other manmade structures.

Also Read: How AI Can be Used in Smart Cities: Applications Role & Challenge

So, today we will discuss right here how satellite imagery dataset used in artificial intelligence with AI applications.

AI APPLICATIONS FOR SATELLITE IMAGERY

Actually, in artificial satellites are manmade satellites, and AI is used in satellite imaging through two ways — One-level” applications and Multi-level” applications. Hence, to clarify both level applications, it’s important to discuss from a technical perspective, these applications require complex machine learning pipeline for various types of projects.

“One-step” Applications of Satellite Data

The first and most important applications of satellite imagery data are making the various objects detectable to computer vision from the space level heights.

Objects like urban area boundaries are important for municipalities, buildings, road segments, government agencies, rescue teams, military, and other city agencies. And such things can be easily observed from space satellites through captured images taken from advanced cameras.

“Multi-level” Applications of Satellite Data

Another crucial application of satellite data in AI developments is at the time of detecting the object the task has been allowed by several integrated ready-to-use pipelines using convolutional neural nets there are some issues with satellite imagery which make this task more challenging.

Multi-level applications are ones in which information, extracted from satellite imagery is only a line of features in a more complex ML system.

From detecting the cars in the parking area to crop yield prediction, oil inventory detection and monitoring the economic activity of some countries across the globe, especially — hard-to-reach ones, such as China.

Detecting the Cars in the Parking Area

Satellite images can count the cars in the parking zone and when these images are annotated and used as a training data to develop an AI-based algorithm to accurately detect and count cars on satellite imagery at parking lots across the globe and enhance this data using other sources, it’s possible to predict footstep count at the retailer’s shops.

Aerial Field Mapping of Agricultural Fields

Another application of satellite images data can help the AI model in crops’ yields and price prediction. The AI model builds on remote sensing data has proven a very successful tool for estimation yields.

From the other side, it’s obvious that yield-related tasks cannot be solved only by vegetation indices, thus more features should be included, such as weather and soil-related data.

However, from the other side, it’s obvious that yield-related tasks cannot be solved only by vegetation indices, thus more features should be included, such as weather and soil-related data.

Along with the huge quantity of satellite imagery training data gathered from such sources, if we augment these features with prices and sentiment analysis, it’s possible to create a model beating official forecasts in terms of timing and accuracy.

Estimating the Inventory of Oil Reserves

The third application of satellite images dataset is estimating the inventory level of oil by detecting the shadows on such tankers or oil-wells.

This idea is pretty straightforward, as most of the fuel tanks have floating top, it’s possible to calculate it’s volume and the amount of in it, utilizing very simple trigonometry to estimate liquid level in a container.

Actually, using the polygon annotation the shadows can be precisely annotated if locations of all such oil tanks detected through space satellites. And the data extracted from satellite imagery or gathered from some databases can calculate global oil inventories.

Here oil and gas companies are the investors who can monitor competitors, probably government agencies managing oil reserves, interested in timely information on other countries’ energy resources.

Monitor the Economic Activities of Countries

Another important application of satellite imagery datasets is to monitor the economic activities of the various countries globally. Mainly for the countries hard-to-reach ones, like China.

For example, the unusual activity at the actual line of control at the India-China border can be monitored through satellite images of Galwan valley where dispute started.

Monitoring the images, if you can give an independent satellite-powered measure cities developments like car density, construction rates, electricity consumption through nighttime illumination including import and export operations or ship count and sizes, aircraft count in airports, combine it with traditional surveys, statistics and media data and, finally, pack it in some index, it can be valuable for investors and government agencies.

Companies providing the high-quality satellite imagery data sets for machine learning based AI development. It is offering the world-class data annotation service with expertise in image annotation services to create training data sets for computer vision based AI models.

Also Read: Why Data Annotation is Important for Machine Learning and AI

It can annotate the satellite images using various image annotation techniques to generate datasets for machine learning models with best level accuracy at minimum cost.

This article was originally featured on www.anolytics.ai