The Problem

The commercialization of the geospatial industry has led to an explosive amount of data being collected to characterize our changing planet. One area for innovation is the application of computer vision and deep learning to extract information from satellite imagery at scale. CosmiQ Works, Radiant Solutions and NVIDIA have partnered to release the SpaceNet data set to the public to enable developers and data scientists to work with this data.

Today, map features such as roads, building footprints, and points of interest are primarily created through manual techniques. We believe that advancing automated feature extraction techniques will serve important downstream uses of map data including humanitarian and disaster response, as observed by the need to map road networks during the response to recent flooding in Bangladesh and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Furthermore, we think that solving this challenge is an important stepping stone to unleashing the power of advanced computer vision algorithms applied to a variety of remote sensing data applications in both the public and private sector.