After a long delay Worldview-4 has been launched. This means that now the DigitalGlobe constellation of satellites can photograph any spot on Earth more than 4 times per day at a resolution of 30 cm (panchromatic) or 120 cm (multi-spectral which include near infrared) and with a locational accuracy of 3 meters. Worldview-4’s orbit is 617 km above the Earth. It has an average revisit time of less than a day and can capture 680,000 square km, which is 70 terabytes of imagery per day. (The Earth’s surface area is 510 million square kilometers.)
This augments the16 years or 80 petabytes of Earth-observation imagery that DigitalGlobe holds in its library.
Digital Globe has put all of the data on the public cloud (Amazon) and has provided a platform that supports efficient search, processing and workflows. GBDX is an online environment for efficiently running advanced algorithms for information extraction from imagery datasets at scale. It is a set of RESTful APIs, and algorithms that have already been implemented by Digital Globe or its partners include car counting, orthorectification, land use, land cover, and atmospheric compensation. One of the most important efficiencies of the GBDX architecture is that it avoids having to move huge volumes of data over the internet. It does this by bringing the application to the data, rather than the data to the application.
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