14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Garage, the software giant’s division responsible for a series of experimental projects that eventually turned out to be super-successful, has released a new app called Earth Lens.
With support for iOS, Earth Lens can detect and identify objects in aerial imagery, relying on Microsoft AI and machine learning to provide data to researchers.
“With this tool, researchers will be able to automatically extract information from a large dataset and have the analysis presented in a useful and interactive view. As a result, this tool can be useful in various industrial or agricultural applications to further Microsoft’s AI For Earth commitment to sustainability,” Microsoft explains.
Only coming with iPad support
While it’s not the kind of app that consumers would run on a daily basis, Earth Lens has the potential of helping to address things like disaster relief using nothing more than satellite images.
“Users are able to upload images, process the locally without the internet, and then scroll through and analyze the data. Earth Lens helps users automatically aggregate, count, classify and label the objects in satellite images. Colored bounding boxes are drawn around detected objects, which users can toggle on and off to control the information displayed. A time series analysis view allows users to look at images over time alongside a data visualization chart to identify trends and patterns,” Microsoft further explains.
Earth Lens only runs on an iPad powered by iOS 9.0, so support for the iPhone isn’t offered just yet.
Microsoft Garage has also released the source code for the application on GitHub and the group responsible for the project says further improvements could be made in the future.
The Garage team is also the one that brought us the Microsoft Launcher app for Android, so with a little luck, this project can become a highly-successful idea as well.