US: DigitalGlobe has announced that it has been awarded a contract valued at $3.2 million by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA) to provide an unclassified environment with multi-source content for geospatial cloud analytics. This platform, called the Geospatial Cloud Analytics Hub (GCA Hub), will enable military and intelligence end users to leverage machine learning to extract insights at scale and make critical decisions.
MDA will provide RADARSAT-2 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and SAR data curation and processing tools to help DARPA users detect features and change faster and more accurately within GCA Hub.
DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data platform ( GBDX), a commercially-developed, cloud-based analytics platform, will serve as the foundation for DARPA’s GCA Hub. GBDX provides access to DigitalGlobe’s 100-petabyte library of high-resolution satellite imagery as well as open-source and commercial data provided by the company’s growing list of content ecosystem partners. MDA’s RADARSAT-2 SAR dataset permits users to observe valuable features and changes that go undetected with other imaging techniques and provides day and night coverage regardless of weather.
The GCA Hub enables Defense Department analysts to apply government, commercial and open-source algorithms to geospatial data sources including electro-optical (EO) imagery, SAR imagery, and automatic identification system (AIS) data. This process allows analysts to exploit geospatial information at a scale never done before and focus on understanding what’s happening on Earth at any time. With GCA Hub, DARPA advances the state-of-the-art for enabling analysts with a secure, powerful tool to make sense of the growing volume of geospatial data for projects like predicting food shortages, locating the construction of oil fracking sites, and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
“DARPA’s requirements demonstrate the power of processing and interpreting large amounts of different kinds of geospatial data at scale,” said Dr. Shay Har-Noy, DigitalGlobe Vice President of Unified Platform. “Our solution for DARPA leverages strategic investments we’ve already made for commercial customers, proves the utility of our cloud-based platform, and will become foundational to helping defense and intelligence users to solve problems at scale in the future. We are proud to be a trusted DARPA partner.”
DigitalGlobe has been empowering start-ups and established companies to build successful commercial analytics products and services utilizing the innovative and agile GBDX platform. GBDX ecosystem partners provide valuable insights to a variety of industries, including the financial, energy, insurance, defense and intelligence markets, to Build a Better World.