Automated cartography using AI

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).

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
• Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!
• Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.

Featuring:

• Gabriel Ortiz – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Twitter, GitHub, Website

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!