One of the geospatial community’s biggest events is the annual GEOINT Symposium. In April, GEOINT 2018 brought together government and industry leaders to focus on the conference theme: “Driving data to decisions and action.” I’d like to share my observations of this year’s event, which was a milestone for Maxar Technologies—the first time our four businesses (SSL, MDA, DigitalGlobe and Radiant Solutions) attended as a combined company.
Maxar Technologies is at the nexus of the new space economy, positioned at the intersection of what’s new and what’s possible. With the combined capabilities of our four businesses, Maxar does what no other single company can: Deliver integrated space solutions to solve our customers’ most complex challenges.
As Maxar’s geospatial analytics business, Radiant Solutions drives data to decisions and action by supporting the entire geospatial intelligence lifecycle through our three lines of business. Our Sensor and Ground Modernization capabilities help our customers harness the power of global remote sensing platforms. Our Data to Insight capabilities enable customers to enrich and analyze that data at scale. Our Agile Intelligence teams partner with customers to turn data into decisions and action faster.
In his keynote address, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Director Robert Cardillo shared his vision for the agency: “Know the Earth, Show the Way, and Understand the World.” This also describes how Radiant Solutions serves its customers, developing the tools and technology to extract meaningful and actionable insights from a vast amount of data, and ensuring they get the information they need for mission success. Here are three examples we showcased at GEOINT.
Keynote: Robert Cardillo, Director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from Trajectory On Location on Vimeo.
Know the Earth. To know the Earth, our customers need foundational GEOINT that includes mapping features and enrichments as a complement to imagery. Every day, Radiant Solutions produces foundational GEOINT for our customers. We do this through capabilities such as our Radiant Mapping and Production System (rMaps), which is an integrated technical ecosystem (including a cloud-based platform, mapping automation tools and a qualified crowd of mappers) to enable rapid mapping at scale. By applying new, efficient open data production methods to traditional, foundational GEOINT production methods, we enable distributed teams of mappers to work collaboratively with instant access to data as it is extracted and edited. To demonstrate the power of rMaps, we organized a live mapping campaign during GEOINT. Over the course of the event, 37 Radiant Solutions team members, enabled by rMaps, worked diligently to complete a mapping campaign of Nogales, Mexico. In just three days, we mapped 97 percent of our campaign, extracting more than 4,000 roads stretching over 1,200 km. We also mapped 99 percent of the buildings in Nogales by producing 70,934 building footprints (enabled by DigitalGlobe’s GBDX platform) and contributing 3,561 point of interest enrichments.
Show the Way. At GEOINT, Radiant Solutions demonstrated terrain analytic capabilities our customers use to power the mobility and navigation systems that show the way and make routes safer in support of national security and humanitarian missions. xTerrain is a Radiant Solutions terrain and raster analytics system that co-locates data and analytic tools in the cloud. Harnessing the power of cloud computing, our system dramatically reduces terrain analytic production timeframes so that analysts can ask more from elevation data, quickly, and create reliable scaled analytic outputs. Customers are using xTerrain today to produce view sheds, radio propagation models and perform routing operations over friction surfaces at a global mission-supporting scale.
xTerrain enables terrain analytic operations such as viewshed, aspect, hillshade, raster crop, radiofrequency propagation, slope, slope position index, cost surface, opportunity volume and least cost path at scale.
Understand the World. Every day DigitalGlobe satellites collect more than 3 million square kilometers of imagery of our changing planet. Using those images, we can track millions of objects that can be analyzed to understand global change and human patterns of life. At Radiant Solutions, we are leveraging machine learning to apply highly scaled analytics to imagery to reveal insights when and where it matters. At GEOINT, we introduced our machine learning-enabled object detection-as-a-service, which allows customers to apply object detection models against satellite imagery, and share both the models and results with a community of users. We were also proud to earn the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s Industry Achievement Award along with CosmiQWorks and NVIDIA for SpaceNet, a first-of-its-kind open innovation project designed to accelerate the development of machine learning algorithms for extracting information from imagery. Leading up to GEOINT we published this blog and contributed this video on how applying machine learning to imagery can help us better understand the world and support critical national security and disaster response missions.
Radiant Solutions’ Todd Bacastow (second from left) was proud to accept the USGIF Industry Achievement Award for SpaceNet, along with partners from CosmiQWorks and NVIDIA.
These three examples are representative of a broad portfolio of industry-leading capabilities Radiant Solutions showcased through USGIF Lightning Talks, smart talks and demos. We were proud to demonstrate how Radiant Solutions and Maxar Technologies are “driving data to decisions and action,” and will share more examples in the months and years ahead. For more about Radiant Solutions, visit www.radiantsolutions.com.