An NGA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) partner is well on its way to creating an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered prototype to provide global mapping at near real-time in unprecedented resolution. AI-generated maps in 10-meter resolution are already available to NGA’s analysts and customers.
NGA SBIR partner Impact Observatory, along with Esri and Microsoft, made history in the summer of 2021 by launching the first publicly available land-cover map at a 10-meter resolution. The map was the first to use machine learning and big data to update land-cover maps created from human-tagged satellite imagery. It was produced with imagery from Europe’s Sentinel satellite constellation, with funding from Esri and donated server space and computers from Microsoft.