At the GeoIgnite virtual event Ryan Hamilton, Senior Manager 3D Products, at Maxar described a remarkable project Globe in 3D to create a 3D model for the earth’s entire landmass using the petabytes of 50 cm imagery that Digital Globe (and now Maxar) has collected and is collecting from its constellation of satellites.  Multiview stereoscopy technology enables Maxar to create a 3D model for every point (pixel) on earth by combining multiple views of the same point taken at different times and with different camera locations.  The result is a textured 3D model that has better than 3 meter absolute positional accuracy, avoids the blind spots that result from a single camera view, and averages out errors that are often found in individual images.

In 2015 Digital Globe and Saab formed a partnership which created Vricon to integrate 3D technology with Digital Globe’s imagery to enable the creation of an accurately georeferenced 3D model of the earth’s landmass without using control points. (Maxar completed the acquisition of Vricon last year.) The process is compute intensive and is still underway. The result will be a 3D TIN model with textures on all sides for the entire landmass of the planet. The Globe in 3D is available in Vricon format, Esri i3S or Cesium 3D Tiles.

A number of derivative products are also available for specific use cases including digital terrain and digital surface models, textured buildings, classification layers identifying different land uses and vegetation, point clouds, 2D ortho images, 3D vector representations of buildings, vegetation and transportation infrastructure with coverage in dense urban, suburban and rural areas. A limitation resulting from the algorithm that combines images captured at different times is that it is not possible to assign a specific date to  the 3D model at any location. But Maxar does provide tools to enable change detection over longer periods of time.

The 3D model can be used for many use cases including estimating cut and fill for a road, railway or other linear structure, estimating tree height for vegetation management, planning 5G telecom networks and others.  But perhaps it’s biggest achievement could be to provide a shared 3D base map for the entire planet. To assist in realizing this vision Maxar provides precision 3D registration (P3DR) tools to allow other data to be corrected (conflated) to the Maxar base map. P3DR is a stand-alone software solution that automatically georegisters imagery from any source to Maxar’s Globe in 3D base map.