Terrapattern – A visual search tool for satellite imagery | Hacker News Reader

Terrapattern – A visual search tool for satellite imagery

terrapattern.com

128 pointsmatthberg19 comments

The project is more or less abandoned.

It was scheduled to shut down last year: https://twitter.com/golan/status/976202325076467712

It's also open source, though the code hasn't been touched in a few years: https://github.com/CreativeInquiry/terrapattern

[edit: noted shutdown year]

This tweet is from 2018, inferring May 2018? Still appears that it was abandoned, just correcting.

2018 was last year?

Quick response. Instead of shutting it down, we significantly reduced compute resources for the project (reducing CPU count, RAM, and API request quotas). So now it only costs us about $50/month to maintain, previously it was $200/month. We're maintaining it primarily for historical purposes.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a former employee of Descartes Labs.

That being said, Descartes Labs has something very similar on a US-wide scale or global scale, depending on the base layer you select.

see: https://descarteslabs.com/search

Wow - you guys need to find a way to commercialize this.

I manufacture products for an agricultural segment (where limited data exists for sales leads), and was able to focus on one example customer site with some of the unique structures they use. Then it brought me loads of other potential customer sites that matched similarly.

You don't have any workflow to help turn this into leads, so then I have to figure out the address, use Google streetview or something to figure out what place it is, and then turn that into a lead I can turn over to salesperson. But if this was made easier, it would be a great lead-gen machine and I'd happily pay for it. My prospects can't hide from satellites!

I'm a bit out of touch with plans at this point (left DL in November), but certainly one of the points of this as a demo is to show off a capability that could lead to a number of specific use cases. If your interested in using it as you described, the DL sales team would certainly like to talk with you. Or you could contact me (my username at gmail) and I can point you in the right direction.

Got it, sorry I missed that you had left. I'll reach out to them to see if they are thinking about the leadgen aspecet of it.

Curious, would you get any use from a service that updates specific map coordinates (that you, the customer would define) rapidly with a new image? Say 10-20x per day? I'm not a salesperson or anything but I'm working on a prototype for a product idea I have and just started talking to potential customers.

As in, a service that captures new images of a given coordinate 10x+ times per day, using presumably some rapidly updating satellite source?

Personally I would not have a use for that kind of frequency in my business, but others might. 10x per day is a lot though. Maybe someone who needs to know truck flows, flows of ships through seaports.

Hi folks, I'm one of the creators of Terrapattern. It's correct that the project (created in 2015) is now essentially 'abandoned': we are no longer updating the code and datasets. The project is currently running with a very limited compute instance and (furthermore) it looks like we hit our API limits this morning, possibly as a result of this article :( I'll see if I can get it to open up again.

This is still one of my favorite deep learning projects, and has inspired a few algorithm ideas in the hospital environment where I work.

Great job on this!

Thanks much! The goal of our project was to inspire new ways of thinking about images and machine learning. Glad you found our work helpful!

A similar counterpart tool of matching land imagery (like mountain ranges) could be quite useful too. Especially for investigating things like this https://twitter.com/Europol/status/1051812094214066177

Nice. Unfortunately it stopped working after a couple of results. I get this google maps error now - https://imgur.com/a/Yf9Bv5l

This is pretty cool :)

Minor nit: the plural of cul-de-sac is culs-de-sac

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cWGzd21ENI

This is a really cool idea! Looks like it suffers from API limits, though. Would be a cool service to integrate with something like Planet.com.

I started a project like this with them. Never got around to it :p

the UX is unbearable.

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