A U.S. Air Force-funded research project that automates the alignment of maps to satellite imagery is making a leap to further catalog other information on the Internet. The researchers, led by Craig Knoblock at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, use road vector data as the means to bind the two formats together. The success of this approach led the team to create a spinoff company called Geosemble Technologies that is currently developing the map and imagery fusion capability into a software product.
Geosemble has expanded the application beyond just imagery and map data, and only military uses, for such applications as real estate development. The capabilities of this merger of information can be seen at the El Segundo website (www.elsegundobusiness.com). On this site, clicking on individual roofs provides a list of businesses that are located in a specific building, and also harvests information about that business on the Internet. The capability even extends to information from social networking sites to add further context.
The technology has been dubbed GeoXRay and the company is now under contract to develop this capability for the CIA to help solve the overwhelming problem of finding and filtering vast amounts of information.
