New Way Now: Picterra powers geospatial AI analytics with Google Cloud for a sustainable future
23Summary: Martina Löfqvist, head of strategy and partnerships at Picterra, shares how Google Cloud is helping this leading geospatial AI company to build a more sustainable future. With Google Cloud, Picterra is enabling quicker ways to analyze geospatial data with AI to help its customers make more informed decisions in the fight against climate change.
Challenge: Picterra’s cloud-native AI platform brings together geospatial data and transforms it into powerful models that can detect objects, monitor changes, and discover patterns in satellite, drone, and aerial imagery. Picterra was looking for a way to easily manage and deliver the vast computing and intelligence resources needed to support the platform’s unpredictable usage patterns, such as multiple users running models at the same time or massive amounts of data being analyzed simultaneously.
Solution: Picterra decided to adopt Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to power its platform, providing the ability to quickly scale to meet the demands of geospatial AI workloads. With GKE, Picterra can model the terrain of entire countries quickly, even at ultra-high resolutions — for example, the team was able to analyze the whole country of Denmark in just nine hours, using high-resolution satellite imagery. In addition, Picterra also uses Google Earth Engine to provide up-to-date data layers on a global scale for critical environmental monitoring use cases, such as deforestation, reducing the amount of time the team spends on managing the data before it can be delivered to customers.
Results: Combining Picterra’s AI platform and expertise with the power of Google Cloud is providing the geospatial and deforestation data that leaders in government, urban planning, agriculture, and across many other industries need to inform their climate change mitigation efforts and make a positive impact on our planet.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Martina Löfqvist, head of strategy and partnerships at Picterra:
→ “At Picterra, we use Google Kubernetes Engine to power the Picterra platform. This has been very useful for us in order to manage multiple different users at the same time. We also use Google's Earth Engine, which allows us to not have to put a lot of time into data management because the data is already up-to-date. Overall, this helps us more quickly and accurately mitigate climate change.”
→ “We evaluated different cloud providers and ended up going for Google Cloud because of its user-friendliness and flexibility around optimization with GPUs and the high security standards. We also appreciate the reliability of Google Cloud. We haven’t had any issues related to downtime for our customers.”
→ “With Google Cloud, Picterra is building a new way for customers to make informed decisions with geospatial data and AI for a sustainable future.”
Google Cloud products used: Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Earth Engine
Learn more:
→ Introducing Picterra Tracer, a new product for plot monitoring, reporting, and verification: https://goo.gle/3OljQV7
→ Powering geospatial data analytics with machine learning: https://goo.gle/3ZdeotF
→ Machine Learning in the Geospatial Industry: A Beginners Guide: https://goo.gle/3CApdNw