Disaster Imagery – the Missing Element

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Drones help survey disaster areas, providing first responder teams with the situational awareness required for coping with the challenges. However, sometimes drone imagery doesn’t tell the teams all they need to know.

Edgybees, a visual intelligence technology company, has been working with Hood Tech Aero, which provides air-borne imagery. Combining Edgybees’ video analytics software and Hood Tech’s sensors, the new technology provides real-time labels over imagery the drones have captured.

The annotations, which might say something like “hospital,” “school” or “police department,” can help firefighters decide where to apply water or other resources, or assist rescue workers in finding key structures among the rubble.

According to Edgybees, “the major output of a drone is an image of a video, but when people look at the image, they have difficulty understanding it. What we did was to build software that allows you to understand what you’re looking at and we do that in real time.” The system can utilize satellite imagery or radar, and can be used from satellites and space.

Potential uses include not only labeling disaster areas but also labeling the lines in a football game, for example.

Critical infrastructure identification can help responders, relief agencies, mining companies, insurance companies, border patrol and anyone else who needs real time data visualization, according to insideunmannedsystems.com.