GPS World

Tag: Orbital Insight

  • Orbital Insight partners with Satellogic on satellite imagery and video

    Orbital Insight partners with Satellogic on satellite imagery and video

    A sample image from Orbital Insights showing classes of military aircraft at a base. (Image: Orbital Insights)
    A sample image from Orbital Insights showing classes of military aircraft at a base. (Image: Orbital Insights)

    Orbital Insight will integrate Satellogic’s high-resolution multispectral imagery, hyperspectral imagery, and full-motion video into its GEOINT platform

    Geospatial intelligence company Orbital Insight has partnered with Satellogic, a leader in sub-meter resolution satellite imagery collection. The partnership will integrate Satellogic’s high-frequency, high-resolution collections of satellite imagery and full-motion video into Orbital Insight’s platform and offer customers better access to high-quality data, improve the revisit rate, and reduce the cost of running analytics.

    Satellogic designs, manufactures and operates its own constellation of Earth observation satellites. It  has 22 operational satellites in low Earth orbit with plans to launch up to 12 additional satellites by the end of the year. The company aims to expand its constellation to more than 200 satellites by 2025 for daily global coverage of the entire surface of the Earth.

    Orbital Insight’s flagship GO platform combines information from the world’s sensors to analyze economic, societal and environmental trends at scale and support activity-based intelligence. Commercial businesses and government agencies use the self-service platform to synthesize answers to critical questions about what’s happening on and to Earth.

    Satellogic will provide high-resolution Earth observation data at vastly superior unit economics. This will allow Orbital Insight customers to increase the number of daily revisits on points of interest, see a more granular picture and get deep insights that were not possible before.

    “Advanced geospatial analytics require access to high-resolution, high-frequency satellite imagery and simple tasking,” said Kevin O’Brien, CEO, Orbital Insight. “Satellogic is disrupting the industry with a cost-effective, vertically integrated business model. This approach aligns well with our philosophy of making geospatial intelligence efficient, intuitive, and simple so that our customers can get timely insights, make critical decisions, and respond faster.”

    “Our mission is to enable greater access to critical Earth observation data. Working with Orbital Insight extends our reach, making our data available to more customers across diverse fields who need to know how the world around them is changing,” said Emiliano Kargieman, CEO and co-founder of Satellogic.

  • DOD tasks Orbital Insight to help identify intentional GNSS disruptions

    DOD tasks Orbital Insight to help identify intentional GNSS disruptions

    A new platform will detect and characterize GNSS spoofing operations using artificial intelligence and commercially available data

    Geospatial intelligence company Orbital Insight has been awarded a contract from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to deliver a technology platform for identifying intentional GNSS interference and manipulation operations across the world.

    The platform will leverage commercially available data to detect GNSS spoofing, where falsified or manipulated GNSS signals are used to confuse adversaries or obscure illicit activities, presenting risk to both government and commercial operations. Orbital Insight was selected through DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) solicitation process seeking commercial solutions to counter the growing threat of GNSS disruptions to national security.

    Research suggests that Russia conducted nearly 10,000 spoofing operations from 2016 to 2018 alone.

    The new technology will significantly improve situational awareness for warfighters, intelligence analysts and safety-of-life applications. Orbital Insight’s platform will leverage its multisensor data stack, artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to alert analysts and operators to potential jamming and spoofing events, techniques commonly used by adversarial actors to cover up activities or sabotage operations.

    The platform leverages a suite of geolocation data — satellites, AIS, ADS-B and internet-of-things devices — along with new advanced algorithms designed to automatically recognize anomalies linked to spoofing, complemented by research intelligence from the nonprofit partner Center for Advanced Defense Studies. Research suggests that Russia conducted nearly 10,000 spoofing operations from 2016 to 2018 alone.

    “Helping organizations understand what’s happening on and to the Earth is at the heart of what Orbital Insight does, and spoofing is a national security problem that has proven challenging to solve,” said Kevin O’Brien, CEO, Orbital Insight. “GNSS spoofing is essentially a data problem, and Orbital Insight’s AI and deep data stack can help identify spoofing, along with other major humanitarian and environmental challenges. This is a perfect example of private and public sectors uniting through technology.”

    Other areas that may be addressed: identifying drug trafficking, illegal fishing, sea-borne piracy and unintentional commercial aviation disruptions

    The technology has broad implications that extend beyond situational awareness of intentional GNSS interference. Other national security, humanitarian and environmental challenges may be addressed, such as identifying drug trafficking, illegal fishing, sea-borne piracy and unintentional commercial aviation disruptions.

    Federal agencies are increasingly complementing their systems with commercial technology and data sources that are unclassified, universally accessible, and shareable with allies. The National Air and Space Intelligence Center will be the first customer to utilize the technology. Upon successful integration, the goal will be to expand this platform widely across the defense, intelligence and civil communities.

    Orbital Insight received the DoD contract on the heels of announcing a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to deliver a computer-vision model that uses synthetic data to detect novel classes of objects.

    The company also recently launched a new class of multiclass object-detection algorithms within its flagship GO platform to help the intelligence community monitor and differentiate activity at thousands of areas of interest. Like all of Orbital Insight’s products, these algorithms are being developed within an ethics framework that shapes the company’s work and values privacy.

    Image: matejmo/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images
    Image: matejmo/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images

  • Monitoring the Earth for geopolitical and economic insights

    Data from Earth Monitor reveals the number of cars and trucks in an area of Amsterdam. (Image: Airbus)
    Data from Earth Monitor reveals the number of cars and trucks in an area of Amsterdam. (Image: Airbus)

    The new Earth Monitor tool draws from the Airbus imagery archive and satellite tasking capabilities to provide advanced geospatial analysis, trends and detection maps.

    Available as part of Airbus’s OneAtlas suite of geospatial tools, Earth Monitor enables customers to draw precise, timely and meaningful conclusions. It uses Orbital Insight’s machine learning and computer vision expertise through algorithms that detect changes in infrastructure and land use in near-real time. It can identify and count objects such as cars, trucks, roads, homes, buildings and construction sites and, soon, aircraft.

    Earth Monitor can identify trends, spot patterns and track economic activity, delivering advanced geospatial analysis and change-detection maps on customized areas of interest to users in defense, intelligence and law enforcement.

    Earth Monitor comes from a collaboration between Airbus Defense and Space, a French aerospace company, and Orbital Insight, a Silicon Valley startup. The OneAtlas platform combines Airbus’ constellation and tasking services with Orbital Insights’ analytic capabilities.

    Orbital Insight’s algorithms draw on petabytes of data from multiple sources, such as satellite and synthetic aperture radar imagery, geolocation intelligence and vessel traffic data.

    The tool’s interface enables users to create and manage projects, customize analyses and define period and measurement frequencies.

  • Airbus, Orbital Insight partner on OneAtlas analytics platform

    Europe-based Airbus Defence and Space has entered into a partnership with Orbital Insight, a U.S.-based geospatial analytics company, to build a suite of geospatial analytics services and tools.

    The agreement will provide Orbital Insight with access to Pleiades and SPOT satellite imagery at scale, and provide Airbus with analytics services, making Orbital Insight the first analytics partner for the Airbus Digital Platform OneAtlas.

    The OneAtlas Platform is a collaborative environment enabling users to easily access constantly updated satellite imagery, perform large-scale image processing, extract industry-specific insights, and benefit from Airbus assets to develop tailored solutions for a wide range of markets in both commercial and government sectors, the company said.

    “Under this agreement, we will offer premium analytics capabilities to a large range of users, powered by Orbital Insight’s services and tools,” said François Lombard, director of the Intelligence Business at Airbus Defence and Space. “The OneAtlas Platform is definitively the cornerstone to leverage both Airbus and partner assets to support our customers’ business development and growth.”

    “We’re proud to be Airbus’ first geospatial analytics partner on the OneAtlas Platform,” said James Crawford, Orbital Insight’s CEO and founder. “Along with our new satellite imagery agreement, this partnership drives customer value for those looking to better understand what’s happening on and to Earth.”

  • DigitalGlobe Expands Partnership with Orbital Insight

    This image depicts how Orbital Insight is detecting building shadows in Nanjing, China, to monitor construction rates in the area.
    This image depicts how Orbital Insight is detecting building shadows in Nanjing, China, to monitor construction rates in the area.

    DigitalGlobe has expanded its partnership and offering with Orbital Insight, a market intelligence and data science company that analyzes socioeconomic trends at global, regional and hyper-local scales.

    Within DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data platform, Orbital Insight’s machine vision engineers, artificial intelligence experts and data scientists now have access to 400 terabytes of high-resolution imagery, an increase of nearly 80 times the data that was available for analysis under the previous partnership agreement.

    The partnership is enabling Orbital Insight to more quickly validate its hypotheses and understand a variety of trends in the commercial and humanitarian markets. Having access to this volume of DigitalGlobe’s data allows the ability to visualize and analyze even larger areas of interest around the globe, allowing users to better understand the economic trends impacting industries and markets, according to DigitalGlobe.

    “Orbital Insight’s customers — hedge funds, Fortune 500 companies, and global humanitarian organizations — will now be able to understand near real-time global economic trends with even greater precision and scale,” DigitalGlobe writes in a blog. “In one recent project, Orbital Insight leveraged DigitalGlobe imagery to process 4 trillion DigitalGlobe pixels in a 48-hour period, counting 700 million cars that yielded tradable insights into national shopping behavior for the company’s customers on Wall Street. This fall, Orbital Insight expects to release several new data analytics products, including worldwide monitoring of crude oil storage inventories and monitoring construction rates across the major cities in China, which are powered by DigitalGlobe’s image library and Geospatial Big Data platform.”

    “This expanded partnership with DigitalGlobe accelerates the realization of Orbital Insight’s vision for a macroscope, a scientific instrument for helping human society to see itself in a new light,” said James Crawford, CEO of Orbital Insight. “The partnership enables us to more quickly validate our hypotheses and understand a variety of trends in the commercial and humanitarian markets. Having access to this volume of data gives us the ability to visualize and analyze even larger areas of interest around the globe, allowing us to better understand the economic trends that are impacting industries and markets.”

    “The era of geospatial big data has arrived,” said  Shay Har-Noy, DigitalGlobe’s Senior Director for Geospatial Big Data. “DigitalGlobe’s platform provides the largest commercial library of current and historical satellite imagery available, integrated into a cost-effective environment where meaningful insight can be extracted from the data through algorithms built by companies like Orbital Insight.”

    To learn more about DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data platform, visit developer.digitalglobe.com.