How Deep Learning Gives Us a Precise Picture of All the Water on Earth

Where exactly is all the water on Earth's surface? Stand-alone satellite images have their limitations, but using artificial intelligence to examine them can now glean precise levels of water around the world and how they are changing week by week. Palo Alto startup Orbital Insight uses freely available images taken by the U.S. Geological Survey's Landsat 7 and 8 satellites, much like the images you see on Google Maps. The startup feeds the images into a neural network, which pinpoints the exact location and area of surface water. While it's not a new feat to track the Earth's water levels, Orbital Insight is approaching the task with a specially trained neural network that labels water pixel by pixel.