Hello, everyone. I'm Ashish Jain,
Product Manager in the Azure
Orbital team. With Azure Orbital,
our goal is to empower every person
and every organization to achieve
more both on and off the planet.
Last year, we announced Azure Orbital as
a new Ground Station as a Service available
in private preview for our customers.
Today, we wish to share more
updates with you on Azure
Orbital. Azure Orbital is a managed service
that lets you communicate to your satellites,
control your satellites, uplink and downlink
data, process data on the cloud and
thereby, scale your operations directly
on Microsoft Azure. As part of Azure Orbital,
we are deploying multiple satellite
ground stations in our data centers,
enabling a variety of scenarios
including Earth Observation,
Remote Sensing and Global Communications,
cutting across a variety
of industry segments.
With Azure Orbital,
our goal is to enable our customers
and partners with a vibrant ecosystem.
Today, we are happy to share with you
another great partner in our ecosystem,
Thales Alenia Space,
who bring great data processing
inferencing and analytics capabilities
to our customers with Azure Orbital.
For Earth Observation and Remote Sensing,
today we will cover few updates
and show you a demo of data
processing and analytics using Azure
Orbital and satellite imagery.
A quick recap on our very flexible
high level architecture. Customer can
onboard their satellites on Azure Orbital
using APIs an Azure portal experience.
But once onboarded, customers can schedule
contacts with their satellites using
Microsoft and partner ground stations.
With Microsoft ground stations, we leverage
ground station virtualization
by digitizing the radio signal at
the ground station and processing the
signal in the cloud using high-speed
software modems from our partners
running as virtual network functions
optimized specifically for Azure.
The processed data is then delivered to
the customer�s virtual network, where it
can be further processed and enriched
using multiple other Azure services
including: Compute, Storage,
AI, Machine Learning,
and Cognitive Services at enormous scale.
Orbital can also provide fully digitized
wideband raw signal that is raw
IQ to the customers for processing
for unique scenarios. We have
been heads down building our own
constellations in our data centers.
This is our first ground station at
our Quincy Data Center in the state
of Washington, housing two 6.1
meter antennas supporting X, S and UHF bands.
Over the course of this year, we plan
to build many more ground stations and
also make partner ground stations available
from our partners
to enable our customers to ingest
data directly in Azure.
Our demo will go deeper into the
value-chain of Earth observation and
demonstrate how satellite imagery,
downlinked using Azure Orbital, can be
processed on the cloud for analytics
in near real time and provide insights
that can transform businesses.
We will demonstrate this in three
quick steps.
In step one, we will downlink Earth
imagery from a customer satellite
called Deimos-2.
In September, last year,
we demonstrated how customers can
downlink data from the satellite
using Azure Orbital by showing you
a live downlink from AQUA,
which is a public satellite
owned and operated by NASA.
Now for this, for the sake of this
demo, we have already downlinked few
of the images and parked them in Azure
Storage Blob from Deimos-2. In step
two, we will demonstrate how the raw
data from the Azure Storage BLOB
can be processed by EarthPipeline,
a data processing pipeline
for satellite imagery that can
enrich satellite images and
make them analytics ready.
We will then store the processed
analytics ready assets in Azure Storage
Blob which we process in step three.
In step three,
we will demonstrate how these
analytics ready images can be
inferenced by using Deeper Vision,
a capability by our new partner,
Thales Alenia space,
which brings capabilities like change
detection, entity recognition,
and multiple other Artificial
Intelligence and Machine Learning
on Azure at scale.
With that I invite Chris, Vice
President of Engineering at EarthDaily Analytics (formerly UrtheCast),
to show us a demo of EarthPipeline
running on Azure, Chris over to you.
Thanks, Ashish.
Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Rampersad
from EarthDaily Analytics, formerly
known as UrtheCast. We're a data
and geoanalytics company specializing
in satellite image processing.
I'm very pleased to be here today
to tell you about the world's
first Sat Ops Processing service
called the EarthPipeline,
which connects seamlessly with Azure Orbital.
The EarthPipeline automatically
transforms raw downlink data as
shown here into ultra-high quality
Analytics Ready Data in minutes using
rigorous physical modeling combined
with the latest advancements in
Computer Vision and Machine Learning.
This quality is key to powering
Reliable, automated, actionable, insights
without humans in the loop,
which ultimately reduces costs,
improves accuracy and enables scalability.
This is a new ground solution, specifically
designed for the needs of new space.
As shown in the yellow box,
once the satellite imagery is downlinked,
the EarthPipeline does the rest
by automatically delivering
Analytics Ready Data straight to
the customer or application.
This service provides satellite
owners with vastly improved quality
and reduced complexity versus
traditional ground segments,
and it's backed by a guaranteed SLA. The
EarthPipeline also reduces the need
for costly operational facilities,
software maintenance and processing,
calibration, and
QA operations which can save satellite
owners millions both in upfront costs
and in yearly operational expenses.
As shown here, the EarthPipeline
offers rapid commissioning,
including sensor characterization and
image sharpening, scientific quality
radiometric calibration,
sub-pixel accuracy
geometric processing,
accurate automated QA backed by a
guaranteed SLA and high quality
mosaicking capabilities as shown
here on the left.
As you can see,
the imagery is both radiometrically
and geometrically normalized
by the EarthPipeline.
The EarthPipeline was also selected
in a highly competitive U.S.
Department of Defense Space Challenge
as one of the 26 technologies out
of more than 800 that are expected
to revolutionize the space industry.
This service was also developed
by a team of experts who worked in
other world class ground systems,
including the Worldview and RapidEye
constellations.
Now, let's take a look at what the
EarthPipeline can do with the Deimos-2
satellite and Azure Orbital.
Once the data is delivered to Blob Storage,
the EarthPipeline can then automatically
generate Analytics Ready Data
products as seen in the Azure console.
Once processing is complete,
the products are ready
for automated insights.
To give you an idea of what
the EarthPipeline is doing,
let's look at raw imagery of Sacramento,
shown on the left versus processed
imagery shown on the right.
The raw imagery on the left is,
typical high quality pushbroom
satellite data before any processing
takes place. After processing,
you can see here, the Deimos-2 imagery
has extremely high radiometric and
geometric accuracy that's ready to
power analytics at a fraction of a
traditional ground segment cost.
Now let's take a look at recently
processed data of Sacramento from 2021,
shown on the right,
and imagery from 2016 on the left.
Both Deimos-2
images are extremely well
normalized to sub pixel accuracy,
which you can see when you zoom in
on the imagery and look closely at
the features on the landing strip.
This quality is key to extracting
reliable automated insights from
the data at scale,
without humans in the loop.
Exploring another area,
say the Valley High football field,
you can see that both the radiometry and
geometry are still extremely well normalized
even though the images are five years apart.
Next,
Thales Alenia Space will show us what they
can do with Analytics Ready Data products
from Deimos-2. Thank you, Chris, for a great
overview of EarthPipeline running
on Azure and some of its capabilities
that our customers can make use of
with Azure Orbital.
Now, let's see how the downlinked
images processed into final
analytics ready assets can be
influenced using Deeper Vision.
I wish to now invite Romain, from
Thales Alenia Space, to show you
a demo of Deeper Vision technology.
Hi, so I'm a Romain Hugues and I'm an
engineer in Artificial Intelligence
for Earth observation in Thales Alenia
Space. Today, I will present you with
Deeper Vision change detection software
now available on Azure Orbital
thanks to Microsoft.
As you may know,
the latest generation of Earth
Observation satellite,
connect enough images each day to feed
more than 100,000 computer screens.
Deeper Vision performs automated
content extraction from images
and enriches images data so the
user can request images from given
content and focus on task where
human expertise is really critical.
The application we will see today
is called change detection
and site monitoring. Every time a
new image arrives on a given area,
Deeper vision will compare it with
the latest previously acquired
image and highlight places that
changed significantly.
For instance,
on this region of the Middle East we
have two images taken by European
Space Agency Satellite Sentinel-2,
one from 2016 and one from 2018.
So, we can see that volume of Earth
have been removed in parts of the
desert and some new buildings appeared,
and there are also new roads.
Here is what the change detection algorithm
highlights, everything that's changed.
So, this is the architecture
of the change detection pipeline on
Microsoft Azure. It was deployed
in order to use Microsoft Azure
functionalities such as Blob
Containers Azure functions and Azure
Kubernetes services. Image data
arrives in the Blob Container and
the next five Azure functions are
here to collect information about
location and date from image metadata.
It results, on the right, in a queue
containing the image pair to be
compared. For each pair, a change
map is computed with the provision
change detection algorithm
using the Kubernetes service and the
output is sent in another Blob Container.
Deeper vision will soon be available
on Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
Now, this is the demo from Deeper Vision.
So, images from Sacramento
just arrived in the Blob Container.
We can have a look at it.
DP input. Here.
We have the two images.
And the Azure function detects
the presence of the image files
automatically and it launched
the change detection processing
automatically. We can move to the
cluster monitoring dashboard
and see that the processing
pipeline has started
and the CPU usage is following the type
of processing. First, the preprocessing and
then the change detection itself in green.
So, the Kubernetes cluster is able to
autoscale in response to new pair of images
and the processing takes a few
minutes for a pair of images
and here it's finished.
Now, let's have a look at the results.
So, it is available in the Blob Container
here and we can download it on our PC.
So, download this pretty fast
and we can open the images
and have a look at them
in QGIS,
for instance, or ArcGIS.
So, this is the image before
with two region of interest.
And the image after 2021.
And in yellow are highlighted the changes.
So, in the urban areas,
we will have a look here.
So, before, after, we can see that
there was some new buildings.
And these new buildings are highlighted
in yellow because of the construction.
We can have a look at the other areas.
Here before, construction site.
After, new neighborhood.
And some changes here.
Alright, thank you very
much for your attention.
Thank you, Romain, for a wonderful
demo with Azure Orbital.
Our customers can leverage Deeper Vision
capabilities to process their data from
satellites in near real time manner
using the power and scale of the cloud.
We are proud to hear what our
customers and partners are saying.
Here is what EarthDaily Analytics (formerly UrtheCast) has to say.
Urthecast is very excited to use the
Azure Orbital platform which transforms
a conventional ground station model
to a new on-demand data downlinking
service that goes straight to the cloud.
This service enables near real-time
processing of the Deimos-2 satellite
with our EarthPipeline technology,
allowing us to rapidly deliver high
value insights direct to the customer.
Here is what Thales Alenia Space has said.
Working with Azure Orbital,
Microsoft and Thales,
Alenia Space are innovating what
their customers in the space
industry can achieve with the power
of the cloud today.
Customers can combine Azure Orbital
ground segment capabilities to ingest data
directly in Azure, with Thales Alenia Space
Deeper Vision capabilities to process data
and generate timely insights
powered by Artificial Intelligence and
Machine Learning at enormous speed and scale,
creating unprecedented impact
both on and off the planet!
Now, let's shift gears and move to
Azure Orbital Global communications.
Let's quickly recap and give you
a sneak peak of Orbital-5G by
interconnecting their existing
ground stations,
or by co-locating ground stations
in our data centers,
satellite providers can use our global
backbone for delivering traffic to
multiple locations-to customers on
premise network, to customers in Azure
in same or
another region,
or back to their network in another region
or leverage our ISP pairings to
exit out to Internet.
In the process, they can combine various
Azure services with Azure Orbital.
Let's now take a look at how providers can
take advantage of this with Orbital-5G!
In the demo setup, we integrate
satellite connectivity with virtualized
mobile packet core from Affirmed,
which is now part of Microsoft,
using Azure Orbital.
In this demo setup,
the remote site only has a radio
equipment that is satellite antenna and
in eNodeB and this can very well be
a gNodeB, as well, for a 5G network.
Now, Orbital-5G
creates a remote private cellular network,
running completely on the cloud
over the satellite network,
providing one hub and dedicated
connectivity to the cloud,
into internet while bringing various
Azure services to the remote sites.
Let's see a quick demo of Orbital-5G
in action.
The iPhone has the SIM card which is
registered with the private instance
of Affirmed mobile packet core
running in Orbital virtual network.
We will now remove the iPhone
from the airplane mode.
You will now notice that the
iPhone seamlessly connects to a
private cellular network created by
Orbital over the satellite network.
Since the cellular network
is the only network on the device
in this demo setup,
accessing internet will be breakout
from Azure using Orbital.
Hence, you would notice that if I check
my public IP address you will see an
Azure IP address. Using Orbital-5G,
satellite providers are empowered to
achieve more by providing private 4G
or 5G cellular services over satellite
connectivity to their customers.
That brings us to the end
of my presentation today.
Thank you so much
for your time and please do not hesitate to
reach out to me at ashish.jain@microsoft.com.
Thank you and have a wonderful day.