As reported by MIT Technology Review: The next time you drive to Home Depot you may help a Wall Street firm
decide whether it should invest in the company. A startup called Orbital Insight
is using commercially available satellite imagery and machine learning
to analyze the parking lots of 60 different retail chains to assess
their performance.
Founder James Crawford expects images from above to provide all sorts of business intelligence. “We’re just starting to discover what can be done with this kind of large-scale data,” says the alum of both NASA and the Google project that digitized over 20 million books.
Orbital
Insight is using a promising new technique known as deep learning to
find economic trends through satellite-image analysis. Deep learning
uses a hierarchy of artificial “neurons” to learn to recognize patterns
in data (see “Deep Learning”).
“A
satellite can cover every square inch of the earth every two weeks. You
can’t stop that,” he says. “We don’t drive what imagery the satellite
takes.”
Founder James Crawford expects images from above to provide all sorts of business intelligence. “We’re just starting to discover what can be done with this kind of large-scale data,” says the alum of both NASA and the Google project that digitized over 20 million books.
The shadows in such images can indicate the fullness of a container. |
Interest in satellite imaging is growing, and the cost is coming down.
Google snatched up the satellite-image-processing company Skybox Imaging
last August, and today Google Ventures and other investors, including
Sequoia and Bloomberg Beta, announced they had sunk $8.7 million into
Crawford’s company.
To
predict retail sales based on retailers’ parking lots, humans at
Orbital Insights use Google Street View images to pinpoint the exact
location of the stores’ entrances. Satellite imagery is acquired from a
number of commercial suppliers, some of it refreshed daily. Software
then monitors the density of cars and the frequency with which they
enter the lots.
Crawford’s
company can also use shadows in a city to gather information on rates
of construction, especially in secretive places like China. Satellite
images could also predict oil yields before they’re officially reported
because it’s possible to see how much crude oil is in a container from
the height of its lid. Scanning the extent and effects of deforestation
would be useful to both investors and environmental groups.
Over time, Orbital Insight’s software can identify trends and make
predictions. “Then it’s not an image anymore—it’s some sort of
measurement,” Crawford says.
That
still leaves open the question of an unwanted eye in the sky. Not
everyone likes the idea of being monitored as they run errands, and
businesses may reject the idea of being watched from space. Crawford
says satellites are already collecting this information—intelligence
agencies have been using it for decades—and Orbital Insights is just
making sense of the data.
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