The network of satellites circling the globe has given us the ability to capture images from any place on Earth. But two-dimensional photos don't always tell the full story.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) wants to be able to create reliable 3-D maps using satellite imagery and is issuing a challenge to the nation's coders to develop a software package to do just that.
"Numerous commercial satellites — including newly emerging CubeSats — cover large areas with higher revisit rates and deliver high-quality imagery in near real-time to customers," according to IARPA Program Manager HakJae Kim. "Although the entire Earth has been — and continues to be — imaged multiple times, fully automated data exploitation remains limited."
The two-phase Multi-View Stereo 3-D Mapping Challenge will kick off July 11 with the ultimate goal of creating a 3-D mapping system, as well as a community citizen scientists interested in working on future crowdsourcing challenges.
The challenge includes a total of $14,000 in prizes during the initial Explorer phase, though the full challenge has a prize pool of $100,000. Prize allocations for the Master contest have yet to be determined.
Judging for the Explorer phase is scheduled for August, with the Master phase right on its heels in September. The final winners are expected to be announced in October.
The challenge website includes the judging criteria, as well as sets of useful, existing code and algorithms to help get started.
Challenge organizers noted the crowdsourcing approach will help IARPA tap the "broader research community of industry and academia, with or without experience in multi-view satellite imagery," including those who might have interesting solutions that wouldn't have been shared through traditional contracting methods.
Interested persons can sign up at topcoder.com before the challenge goes live on July 11.
Aaron Boyd is an awarding-winning journalist currently serving as editor of Federal Times — a Washington, D.C. institution covering federal workforce and contracting for more than 50 years — and Fifth Domain — a news and information hub focused on cybersecurity and cyberwar from a civilian, military and international perspective.
