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European Space Imaging Presents
Sensor Stories
QuickBird
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Every satellite has a life. From the nail-biting launch to the most challenging collections and finally, the eventual decommissioning. Join us as we share the story of QuickBird.
See the world through the eyes of QuickBird
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Costa Concordia Disaster
Isola del Giglio, Italy
Image Date: 21 JAN 2012
The Costa Concordia shipwreck tragically took the lives of 32 passengers and led to new safety policies in the cruise line industry.
Images like this one documenting the accident played a key role in the expansion of modern European maritime surveillance activities.
Since 1991, the Burning Man Festival has been inviting people from all over the world to come together yearly in the middle of the desert to build a community focused on ten principles including self-expression, communal effort, and decommodification.
Considered the world’s largest waterfall based on combined width and height, Victoria Falls has been captivating natives, explorers, and tourists for 20,000 years…. a relatively short amount of time in geological terms.
Originally only meant to stand for 20 years as a temporary structure for the 1889 World’s Fair, the Eiffel Tower has become a symbol of the city.
In the year 2002, when this image was taken, it received its 200 millionth visitor and took its place as the most visited tourist attraction in the world.
The largest coral system and biggest structure ever built by living organisms, The Great Barrier Reef is an important part of Australia’s ecosystem and the history of indigenous peoples.
Today, it is estimated that over half of the reef’s corals have been lost since 1985.
This complex of stunning pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo includes The Great Pyramid of Giza – the oldest and the only still standing of the Ancient Wonders of the World.
Its alignment to the stars and cardinal directions along with its massive scale has historians perplexed to this day.
After 13 years in orbit, 70,000 trips around Earth, and 636 million square kilometers of Very High Resolution imagery, QuickBird captured its final image over South Africa. Shortly after, it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, having completed its mission beyond expectation and helping to reshape how we see our planet.
In late April of 2010, the oil drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon, caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Mexico causing the largest marine oil spill in history.
Satellite imagery proved crucial in the tracking and cleanup of this massive oil slick whose environmental effects are still felt to this day.
Originally built for the 1950 FIFA World Cup in which Brazil lost to Uruguay in the deciding match, the Maracanã Stadium would eventually go on to host another final match in the 2014 FIFA World Cup as well as the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2016 Olympics.
QuickBird’s ability to capture 4 band imagery at 61 cm helped usher in an era of new remote sensing applications for industries ranging from agriculture to energy infrastructure monitoring.
UNet architecture for semantic segmentation with ResNet34 as encoder or feature extraction part. ResNet34 is used as an encoder or feature extractor in the contracting path and the corresponding symmetric expanding path predicts the dense segmentation output.
Architecture of VGG16-UNet model
UNet architecture for semantic segmentation with VGG16 as the encoder or feature extractor. VGG16 is used as an encoder or feature extractor in the contracting path and the corresponding symmetric expanding path predicts the dense segmentation output.
Architecture of ResNet34-FCN model
In this model, ResNet34 is used for feature extraction and the FCN operation remains as is. The feature of ResNet architecture is exploited where just like VGG, as the number of filters double, the feature map size gets halved. This gives a similarity to VGG and ResNet architecture while supporting deeper architecture and addressing the issue of vanishing gradients while also being faster. The fully connected layer at the output of ResNet34 is not used and instead converted to fully convolutional layer by means of 1×1 convolution.
Architecture of VGG16-FCN model
In this model, VGG16 is used for feature extraction which also performs the function of an encoder. The fully connected layer of the VGG16 is not used and instead converted to fully convolutional layer by means of 1×1 convolution.