Using Computer Vision to Analyze Big (Aerial) Data from UAVs During Disasters
Recent scientific research has shown that aerial imagery captured during a single 20-minute UAV flight can take more than half-a-day to analyze. We flew several dozen flights during the World Bank’s humanitarian UAV mission in response to Cyclone Pam earlier this year. The imagery we captured would’ve taken a single expert analyst a minimum 20 full-time workdays to make sense of. In other words, aerial imagery is already a Big Data problem. So my team and I are using human computing (crowdsourcing), machine computing (artificial intelligence) and computer vision to make sense of this new Big Data source.
