Delivering Fully Automated, Cloud-based Remote Sensing Applications
By partnering with geospatial SaaS provider Orbify, an Indian remote sensing solution provider is now able to build a single, scalable and future-proof solution for different end users.
Vansandharaa Geo Technologies develops customer oriented remote sensing solutions for governmental urban planning bodies, including city administrations and agro support verticals. The Indian company interprets satellite imagery to extract thematic information for urban, agriculture, environment, disaster and defense applications. Examples of in-house developed algorithms include soil-adjusted vegetation index, moisture stress index and deforestation mapping. The satellite data used by Vansandharaa Geo Technologies consists of both commercial and open sourced data, and where necessary, is complemented by other geospatial data such as lidar.
At the heart of all work processes at the company lies automation, says Advait Kulkarni: “We automatically generate satellite scenes by deploying deep learning models and algorithms that are capable of segmenting, as well as doing object projection or feature extraction at near real-time speed. Automated processing leads to great accuracy in analytics and fast turnaround times.”
However, having different end users requires Vansandharaa Geo Technologies to develop and maintain different user platforms that each have different requirements. This not only requires extra maintenance and application building capacity from the part of Vansandharaa Geo Technologies, but adds unwanted complexity to running a business as a whole. “Ideally, we want to reach a situation where we have a single platform for all of our customers, instead of multiple. This is why we started looking for a partner that would host all of our data on the same platform.”
Towards a single, streamlined solution
The company chose Orbify as their platform of choice. Orbify is a cloud-based platform that enables transforming satellite imagery and geospatial data into fully functional web applications, interactive dashboards and reliable APIs. What’s important for the specific situation of Vansandharaa Geo Technologies is that Orbify enables them to scale and expand their current business offering, build new solutions, manage large numbers of users and adapt to the cloud.
“Because Orbify can host our users on their platform, it becomes possible to create a single, streamlined solution instead of multiple platforms for each customer. They will take care of cloud deployment and user management, so that we can focus on the data workflows. Also, we plan to add analysis capabilities to our current offering, so we need an environment that considers growth.”
First, Vansandharaa Geo Technologies wants to onboard current customers to Orbify’s platform. They will also host Vansandharaa Geo Technologies’ satellite inventory and vector data that form the input for their deep learning models and algorithms. “We are looking at a total of 10-15 individual customers using the same platform, but as we scale, we are looking at more people using the same platform. We are aiming to make this into a product that we can expand in terms of use cases. This would mean a fully automated system where outputs are delivered in real-time in the cloud”, adds Kulkarni.
Providing a unique value proposition
Apart from the data, Vansandharaa Geo Technologies will use Orbify’s platform to process the data: “We have developed our own data analysis workflow and have been using it on our local computation and job resources. This is what we aim to put with the Orbify architecture and integrate with their data placement and computational capabilities.” The results from the data processing are delivered to the end user in a convenient dashboard, which contains a mapping interface similar to Google Maps. Such dashboards are made available by Orbify through a set of templates for application builders.
Kulkarni sees many benefits of the partnership with Orbify:
“What makes Orbify stand out for us is that they take care of the entire technology stack. This is a value proposition that really works to our advantage. By letting Orbify take care of everything from frontend to the backend, user management and more, we can focus on the analytical algorithms that we are building. This makes our lives easier and more streamlined.”
