{"id":17716,"date":"2020-05-11T23:39:51","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T15:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/how-blackskys-spectra-geospatial-data-platform-uses-ai-to-make-sense-of-satellite-images\/"},"modified":"2020-05-11T23:39:51","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T15:39:51","slug":"how-blackskys-spectra-geospatial-data-platform-uses-ai-to-make-sense-of-satellite-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/how-blackskys-spectra-geospatial-data-platform-uses-ai-to-make-sense-of-satellite-images\/","title":{"rendered":"How BlackSky\u2019s Spectra geospatial data platform uses AI to make sense of satellite images"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_562732\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-562732\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-562732\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-blacksky-630x442.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"442\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-blacksky-630x442.png 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-blacksky-1260x884.png 1260w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-blacksky-768x539.png 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-blacksky-1536x1078.png 1536w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-blacksky-2048x1437.png 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-562732\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A color-coded satellite map of an area in northern Virginia shows that parking lots around Dulles Town Center are relatively open, as noted by the oval-shaped patchwork of green blocks just above the center of the image. But other parking lots, noted in shades of orange and red, are relatively busy. Such geospatial information can serve as a measure of economic activity and traffic congestion. (BlackSky Image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>How do you know when a region\u2019s economy has recovered from the coronavirus pandemic? You could wait for the verdict from the unemployment figures, gather reports from individual businesses and scan news reports about business reopeniings. You could count how many cars show up in the parking lots of factories and shopping centers. Or you could just let Spectra do all of that.<\/p>\n<p>Seattle-based BlackSky\u2019s Spectra geospatial data platform can combine satellite imagery and other data inputs to generate insights that are greater than the sum of their parts. It\u2019ll even use AI-enabled image recognition to count the cars.<\/p>\n<p>As the COVID-19 crisis progresses, Spectra is learning how to recognize the early signs of recovery, or the telltale signs of a rebound.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s what BlackSky is really all about: How can we inform you that something is happening, or something is going to happen, before you hear it from anywhere else?\u201d said Patrick O\u2019Neil, director of machine learning and artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n<p>Historically, BlackSky has been one-half of Seattle\u2019s Spaceflight Industries \u2014 along with Spaceflight Inc., a sister subsidiary that concentrates on satellite launch logistics. Over the years, it\u2019s shared in more than $200 million in investments that Spaceflight Industries has attracted from the likes of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel\u2019s Mithril Capital Management, the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen\u2019s Vulcan Capital and the French-Italian Space Alliance.<\/p>\n<p>Now BlackSky is on track to take a dominant role in Spaceflight Industries\u2019 portfolio, due to a recently announced plan for Japan\u2019s Mitsui Ltd. to acquire Spaceflight Inc. Brian O\u2019Toole, president of Spaceflight Industries and CEO of BlackSky, told GeekWire that the transaction should be wrapped up within a month.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Satellite Insights - Brian O'Toole, BlackSky\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/z5KUJKyAdh4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Spaceflight Industries is also involved in a joint venture with Thales Alenia Space known as LeoStella, based in Tukwila, Wash. LeoStella\u2019s mission is to build satellites, including the satellites that will become part of BlackSky\u2019s Earth-observing constellation. Four of BlackSky\u2019s Global satellites are already in orbit, and at least four more are due to be launched this year through SpaceX\u2019s small-satellite rideshare program. Still more satellites will be launched on Indian rockets<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur goal is to get to a baseline 16-satellite service around the first quarter of next year,\u201d O\u2019Toole said.<\/p>\n<p>O\u2019Toole sees the changes that BlackSky, Spaceflight Inc. and LeoStella are going through as healthy signs for Spaceflight Industries as well for Seattle\u2019s aerospace industry. \u201cWe now have three new Seattle companies that came out of this \u2026 each one on its own, off and running to much larger market opportunities,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>The market opportunity for BlackSky is not strictly in satellites, but in the data coming from those satellites and other sources.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBlackSky, at its core, is a monitoring company,\u201d O\u2019Neil said. \u201cWe want to inform our customers about what\u2019s happening, using whatever data source will help us answer their problem. We have our own satellite imagery constellation, and that obviously is a massive injection of high-quality fuel into that analytics engine. But we also use other data sources to provide insight.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Subscribers to the Spectra service can set up the topics they want to keep track of, and in response, the software platform monitors news feeds, social-media postings and other sources for events related to those topics, tied to geographical locations.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_562749\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-562749\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-562749\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-covid-630x341.png\" alt=\"BlackSky Spectra\" width=\"630\" height=\"341\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-covid-630x341.png 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-covid-1260x682.png 1260w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-covid-768x416.png 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-covid-1536x831.png 1536w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/200510-covid.png 1591w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-562749\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A screenshot of the BlackSky Spectra dashboard shows how developments relating to the COVID-19 crisis are fed into the cloud-based collection recommendation system for review. (BlackSky Graphic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cWe have a system that\u2019s called the collection recommendation system, and what this will do is, it will take events that are flowing into our system,\u201d O\u2019Neil explained. \u201cAn event could be a tornado. It could be that the military has procured some new equipment. It could be any number of things. The collection recommendation system will take in those events and score them to determine how valuable a satellite image of this event would be.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For example, a news briefing by the White House\u2019s coronavirus task force almost certainly wouldn\u2019t merit scheduling a satellite image, but disruptions in maritime shipping probably would. Spectra uses artificial intelligence to decide whether it\u2019s worth ordering up a picture from BlackSky\u2019s satellites, or from other satellites operated by BlackSky\u2019s partners.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat actually happened when the COVID crisis started was that we started getting major reports very early on of impacts to how businesses and people were conducting their lives. Those events started falling into the system,\u201d O\u2019Neil said. \u201cAnd because the system is tuned to pick up on things like disease outbreak or troop deployments, the system automatically started tasking our satellites to take pictures of various things going on.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Satellite-based surveys of parking lots are among the tricks of the trade: Spectra uses image recognition to determine how many cars are in the lots, and then the software compares those numbers against a baseline. If you\u2019re worried about places where congestion might violate social distancing guidelines, you\u2019ll want to stay away from the red areas. But once the threat has passed, increased parking-lot usage might well be interpreted as a sign that things are getting back to business as usual.<\/p>\n<p>Similarly, a survey of how many airplanes are parked at a given airport can provide a sense of how the outbreak is affecting air traffic.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_562752\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-562752\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-562752 size-full-width\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/HartsfieldJacksonAtlantaInternational-630x406.png\" alt=\"Atlanta airport satellite image\" width=\"630\" height=\"406\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/HartsfieldJacksonAtlantaInternational-630x406.png 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/HartsfieldJacksonAtlantaInternational-1260x811.png 1260w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/HartsfieldJacksonAtlantaInternational-768x494.png 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/HartsfieldJacksonAtlantaInternational-1536x989.png 1536w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/HartsfieldJacksonAtlantaInternational-2048x1318.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-562752\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A satellite image of Atlanta\u2019s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport reveals an unusually high number of parked airplanes (identified in yellow boxes) and an unusually low number of parked cars. Click on the image for a larger version. (BlackSky Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Spectra isn\u2019t just tuned in to the coronavirus outbreak. Another case study involved tracking how a strike at an Australian port affected coal shipments to China over the course of several months in 2017-2018. Computer models projected how shipping congestion was likely to affect port operations three weeks in advance.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe found that there was major interest in this from commodity traders, obviously, but even the ship operators wanted to know this stuff so they can decide whether to slow down their trip,\u201d O\u2019Neil said. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ll pull off the gas a little bit and travel at a more fuel-efficient rate, because they know, \u2018Hey, even if I get there, I\u2019m not going to be serviced for another five days.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n<p>Spectra is drawing interest from the federal government as well as commercial clients. Nearly three years ago, BlackSky won a $16.4 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory to deliver a version of the platform tailored for government applications. So, how\u2019s that project going?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m not going to get into specific contracts, but I will say our traction both within the U.S. government and internationally has increased significantly,\u201d O\u2019Toole said. \u201cWe now have direct contracts with many organizations \u2026 not only for our imaging capability, but for our analytics capability that gets delivered through Spectra.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Along with Maxar Technologies and Planet, BlackSky is in the running to receive more government business through a procurement process for commercial satellite imagery that\u2019s being managed by the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO is due to announce its plan for procurements this year. O\u2019Toole said he doesn\u2019t expect the coronavirus outbreak to affect that timeline.<\/p>\n<p>With about 100 employees, split evenly between offices in Seattle and in Herndon, Va., BlackSky ranks as the smallest of the three satellite imagery providers on the NRO\u2019s list. But O\u2019Toole said his company is in a good position to punch above its weight, during and after the COVID-19 crisis.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe speed and economics of our satellites are much different than the traditional guys. They\u2019ve got a couple of really big, expensive satellites that provide exquisite imagery. But when you add in the revisit [capability], the speed of delivery and then the economics \u2014 which are going to drive a lot of new commercial information and insights \u2014 I think we have a significantly differentiated capability,\u201d O\u2019Toole said. \u201cI\u2019m really excited about what these next couple of years are going to look like.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A color-coded satellite map of an area in northern Virginia shows that parking lots around Dulles Town Center are relatively open, as noted by the oval-shaped patchwork of green blocks just above the center of the image. But other parking lots, noted in shades of orange and red, are relatively busy. Such geospatial information can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[404,2128,2010,4826,20,442,2341],"class_list":["post-17716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-blacksky","tag-blacksky-global","tag-coronavirus","tag-data-analytics","tag-satellite","tag-satellites","tag-spaceflight-industries"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}