RE: Cool things we do with Satellites #6 : Near real-time detecting of oil spills worldwide
This was really cool, and informative. I love learning about things I would never have found on my own save for a random rabbit-hole like Steemit, or Reddit, etc. You click on one link and find yourself learning about oil spills being detected by sattelite imaging, cool.
This makes me think about AI and its ability to process and comprehend the stream of data that the satelites collect. I assume the dark spots (the oil) isnt being obsevered by some human watching the many, many, many satelite feeds? Presumably, AI does that? AI's ability to look at a picture and understand it, and convey that meaning in a helpful manner is so intriguing!
You may not know this, but one of the ways AI "learns" to better identify what its observing in visual feeds like the satelite images, is by asking humans what we see in those same images. I was surprised to learn, when I log into a website and it asks me to confirm that I am not a robot, and then asks me to click on the specific portions of a picture which are, a street sign or an automobile, or whatever... those are actually data collectors which use our human selections as tests against the accuracy of the bots they are training to do that type of data sorting.
Cool, no?
Love to read comments like these! Great to hear that I have been able to reach someone with something they didn't know :)
Humans certainly make the final call, but AI help provide the humans with a more reasonable amount of images to look into.
Wow my friend @fredrikaa this information is very good and informative, I work in the Venezuelan oil industry but on land, here we still do not have that radar technology, however we can see the spills through well checkers or by the same staff. In the world there have been large oil spills such as the one that originated the oil platform deepwather horizon in 2010, it has been one of the biggest spills, which by the way the movie that tells the story is very good! We must preserve our environment and be attentive to any oil spill, very good satellite technology. Thanks for this information my brother. Regards..!
The radar images from the European Sentinel 1 Satellites is freely available for anyone to use and also gives maps of Venezuela. You can actually access it yourself and use it for free here, so now you just need someone who knows to work with the data :P.
But if you want frequent updates or close monitoring of a particular area, then you will need commercial data.
I think it's great, now from my pc I will enter, the truth is that it is a good technology and it serves as a great help for the oil world, not only to observe oil spills but also for any additional information that is needed. Thank you so much, my dear friend! It is good to always learn new things and to stand by technology!
Indeed you are right @infidel1258, application of AI into this field will be of great help, especially using image processing to discover patterns and change of the sea along oil rig.