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Automated cartography using AI (Practical AI #229)
Your feed might be dominated by LLMs these days, but there are some amazing things happening in computer vision that you shouldn’t ignore! In this episode, we bring you one of those amazing stories from Gabriel Ortiz, who is working with the government of Cantabria in Spain to automate cartography and apply AI to geospatial analysis. We hear about how AI tooling fits into the GIS workflow, and Gabriel shares some of his recent work (including work that can identify individual people, invasive plant species, building and more from aerial survey data).
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Featuring:
Show Notes:
- Automated cartography (integration of different models: buildings, roads, vegetation)
- Detecting and tracking the expansion of forests (period 1957-2020) using both legacy and modern imagery
- Tracking invader species
- Tracking urban growth with AI
- Spatial behavior in beaches using AI
- Inference with SAM (Meta’s Segment Anything Model) over urban areas/viewer.html?webmap=4af373c294e24394ae25e4acadab71cc
- SuperResolution on aerial or satellite imagery
- More of the work of Gabriel and his team can be seen here and also on his LinkedIn profile
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Timestamps:
(00:00) - Welcome to Practical AI
(00:42) - Gabriel Ortiz
(03:41) - Dipping your toes in deep learning
(06:05) - AI meets geospatial
(12:17) - Deep learning tools in geospace
(16:17) - Counting people on beaches
(21:55) - What data are you working with?
(24:58) - Sponsor: Changelog News
(27:07) - More discoveries
(30:33) - Automated cartography
(33:33) - Implications of instant cartography
(36:09) - Current limitations of AI
(41:45) - What excites Gabriel?
(43:35) - Outro