The Thrill of Terrapattern, a New Way to Search Satellite Imagery

Right now, Terrapattern only covers four American cities: Pittsburgh, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York City. Terrapattern is so computing-hungry that it is effectively a proof of concept right now, at least for a team of artists working with less than 35,000. Each metro region takes about 10 gigabytes of RAM--not storage, but active memory. That said, Terrapattern is relatively technically straightforward. It's constructed from a convolutional neural network and CoverTree, an algorithm that remembers some descriptions and allows the searches to happen quickly.