CVPR2022

GeoEngine: A Platform for Production-Ready Geospatial Research

Sagar Verma, Siddharth Gupta, Hal Shin, Akash Panigrahi, Shubham Goswami, Shweta Pardeshi, Natanael Exe, Ujwal Dutta, Tanka Raj Joshi, Nitin Bhojwani

11 citations

Abstract

Geospatial machine learning has seen tremendous aca-demic advancement, but its practical application has been constrained by difficulties with operationalizing performant and reliable solutions. Sourcing satellite imagery in real-world settings, handling terabytes of training data, and managing machine learning artifacts are a few of the chal-lenges that have severely limited downstream innovation. In this paper we introduce the GeoEngine <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> https://apps.granular.ai/apps platform for re-producible and production-ready geospatial machine learning research. GeoEngine removes key technical hurdles to adopting computer vision and deep learning-based geospa-tial solutions at scale. It is the first end-to-end geospatial machine learning platform, simplifying access to insights locked behind petabytes of imagery. Backed by a rigor-ous research methodology, this geospatial framework em-powers researchers with powerful abstractions for image sourcing, dataset development, model development, large scale training, and model deployment. In this paper we pro-vide the GeoEngine architecture explaining our design rationale in detail. We provide several real-world use cases of image sourcing, dataset development, and model building that have helped different organisations build and deploy geospatial solutions.