Google Tool Shows What's on the Surface of the Earth in Real Time (theverge.com) 13
A new dataset from Google shows the features on the surface of the Earth in near real time, the company announced Thursday. The tool, called Dynamic World, uses deep learning and satellite imagery to develop a high-resolution land cover map that shows which bits of land have features like trees, crops, or water. From a report: Land cover maps usually take a long time to produce, and there are big gaps between the time images are taken and when the data is published. They also often don't have a detailed breakdown of what's on the ground in a particular area -- a city would be classified as "built-up" (a designation for human-altered landscapes) even if there are big sections with parks, for example. Dynamic World classifies the land cover type for every 1,100 square feet, Google said. It shows how likely it is that the sections are covered by one of nine cover types: water, flooded vegetation, built-up areas, trees, crops, bare ground, grass, shrub / scrub, and snow / ice. Google detailed its system, developed with the World Resources Institute, in a paper published in Nature's Scientific Data.
hmm (Score:2)
Shows 'snow and ice' in spring time where I live, which has probably never happened in recorded history. Also shows one color that is not covered in the legend. Not sure what to make of it, its partially correct and partially confused.
Re: (Score:2)
Does it show wildfires in real time? (Score:2)
Knowing where there's a tree right now is not spectacularly useful to me. Having current information on wildfire extent would be, since we're coming up on that season. Cal Fire is exotically terrible at it. They give us maps after the fact that aren't particularly accurate at best, and they don't actually tell us where fires are, only where they have been hours ago. Presumably they know what's burning where and when, but they don't feel it's important to tell us, the people who fund them, and whose homes ar
Thinking... (Score:5, Funny)
should I google it, or just look out the window?
Googling...
Limited accuracy (Score:2)
I took a look at my neighborhood. It misidentified vegetation types by did notice where some neighbors had cut down some stands of trees over a 20-yr period.
Interesting idea.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool idea, but it's hard to put TOO much stock in the claim this will be superior because " there are big gaps between the time images are taken and when the data is published" for traditional maps?
I just looked at Google street map for my own street. I live on a corner and if you look at the front of my house facing one street, they have an image from 2021 that shows all of my recent changes like repainting my front porch. If you look at it from the side facing the intersecting street? You get an image from back in 2013 that shows an old wooden fence I no longer have on the property and a car parked there that must have belonged to a previous home-owner.
So yeah ... they're not even consistently keeping their images up-to-date for the road and what's around them.
Re: (Score:2)
Your comparing car apples to satellite apples. Give a read of the paper and you will see that for Dynamic World, every Sentinel 2 image comes into Earth Engine automatically and the processing is applied automatically for that image fairly quickly if the image is cloud free enough to process. The user of the Dynamic World image collection can select which images are used to make up a mosaic. Streetview is totally different.
From the Dynamic World catalog page: https://developers.google.com/... [google.com]
> Dy
Mining (Score:2)
What would they classify an open cut mine as? Desolate?
Direct Link (Score:4, Informative)
Deep Learning (Score:2)
Deep learning to show you what it looks like now? More like Deep Hallucination.