Creating High-Accuracy Digital Maps Around the Globe with Airbus & Ecopia AI

High-Resolution Geospatial Imagery & High-Accuracy Feature Extraction

Organizations around the world depend on high-resolution geospatial imagery to make more informed decisions. After digital maps have been created or produced from the imagery, the analyses and workflows can enable efficiencies and power a wide variety of real-world use cases. For example, insurance underwriters can more accurately identify the flood risk of a property, and municipalities can better plan smart cities and sustainable infrastructure.

The faster and more accurately detailed land cover data can be extracted from imagery sources, the faster and more reliably organizations can enact meaningful change around the globe.‍

Yet, mapping our Earth and extracting these high-definition vector maps from imagery is challenging, especially at scale. Many traditional solutions for extracting land cover classes from imagery have several limitations:

• Their extraction speed is highly variable
• Their extraction accuracy is low and/or unreliable
• Their extraction capabilities are not scalable

Manual extraction teams can extract layers accurately from imagery, but this manual process is slow, expensive, and not scalable over countries, and continents. Some of today’s automated solutions may be fast, affordable, and scalable over certain regions, but their data outputs can be inaccurate, reducing data reliability and usability.

Addressing the Challenge with the Airbus & Ecopia AI Partnership

The Partnership

Offering premium high-resolution satellite imagery spanning every corner of the globe, Airbus searched for a partner to provide rapid, accurate, and scalable land use/land cover feature extraction, made available within the OneAtlas platform. After evaluating various providers, Airbus decided that Ecopia’s capabilities would provide their customers with the most comprehensive feature extraction solution available on the market.‍

Airbus and Ecopia formalized a partnership to deliver next-generation digital maps on a global scale. These digital maps can include over a dozen highly-detailed land use/land cover layers, including road and building footprint data.

This digital mapping solution will provide commercial and government users with an accurate and up-to-date digital representation of their areas-of-interest, driving better decision-making across industries.

Ecopia Vector Maps

This new partnership allows Airbus customers to quickly and easily request Ecopia Vector Maps in their areas of interest. These vector maps leverage Ecopia’s industry-leading artificial intelligence-based systems to extract 12+ land cover classes from Airbus’ high-resolution imagery.

Designed with scalability in mind, new and existing customers can request Ecopia Vector Maps of their areas-of-interest, available on a city to continental-scale — all possible within the OneAtlas platform in just a few clicks, or upon request.‍

Created using Airbus’ global premium 50cm high-resolution satellite imagery, Ecopia Vector Maps deliver GIS professional-level accuracy with no in-house work or development. Our advanced deep-learning systems extract high levels of detail while offering a highly-scalable mapping solution.

The immediate benefits of requesting Ecopia Vector Maps through OneAtlas (or upon demand) include:

• Fine Detail: high-accuracy extraction of 12+ class land cover solution, including building footprints and roads
  
  
• High Accuracy: feature extraction capabilities as accurate as a GIS professional leveraging next-generation artificial intelligence
  
  
• Freshness of Data: up-to-date OneAtlas imagery using Airbus’ Fresh Premium archive, or upon request
  
  
• Fast Delivery, at Scale: acquire imagery and Ecopia Vector Maps across the globe, at scale, to meet your needs in a fraction of the time‍

Use Cases

The ability to leverage Ecopia Vector Maps from Airbus’ high-resolution satellite imagery enables a wide range of use cases for various industries where accurate land cover data is paramount, but rapid extraction and up-to-date imagery is essential.‍

Some of these use cases include but not limited to: Land Administration, Insurance, and Humanitarian Relief.

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