Technology Convergence – Artificial Intelligence and Satellite Imaging

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used for years on satellite images – so why all the excitement? The application of AI and machine learning (ML) to Earth observation (EO) data is a huge growth area, demonstrated by the many online competitions, GitHub repositories and entire businesses founded exclusively on this topic. GitHub is a development platform inspired by the way people work, from open source to business. Users can host and review code, manage projects and build software alongside 31 million developers. However, taking the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of AI as'systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence', AI has been available for many years to address the meatiest challenges in image interpretation.