Maintaining and understanding our physical infrastructure is more critical than ever. However, infrastructure operators often face challenges with traditional methods like costly and time-consuming field dispatch, which make it hard to achieve an evergreen understanding of assets.
Scaling the benefits of remote sensing technologies has been difficult due to challenges in capturing, analyzing, and maintaining up-to-date information. To address these hurdles, Google Maps Platform is introducing a new category of imagery datasets called Imagery Insights. Here’s how it works.
What is Google Maps’ Imagery Insights?
Companies rely on real-time geospatial data to make informed business decisions. Integrated with the Google Maps platform, Imagery Insights is designed to streamline business operations and drive smarter decision-making. This technology simplifies both decision-makers’ and data analysts’ ability to extract real-time insights by integrating Google Maps datasets into Google BigQuery.
Among the integrated datasets, Imagery Insights provides access to insights from Google Street View, which has a repository of over 280 billion images, offering 360-degree and 3D views of infrastructure. Spanning over 100 countries, Google Street View allows companies to extract insights from its imagery without any physical field surveys.
With its seamless integration with Google BigQuery, Imagery Insights also enables advanced spatial analysis of the available imagery. It can also connect to Vertex AI, thus allowing users to automatically identify physical assets and assess their condition for improved infrastructure management. Hosted on Google Cloud, Vertex AI can connect directly to Google Street View imagery to identify and monitor the condition of infrastructure assets, including telephone poles, street signs, roads, and bridges.
As an example, a telecom company can leverage Imagery Insights to locate its mobile towers virtually and determine if they need any maintenance work.
Types of imagery in Google Maps
Here are the main types of imagery included in the Google Maps ecosystem:
- 2D Maps and Tiles
These constitute the foundational maps, providing standardized road views, which can be customized to meet specific business needs and brand requirements. - Satellite imagery
This represents high-resolution, photorealistic images of the Earth’s surface, including historical imagery (going back to 1984 for selected areas). - 3D Maps and Tiles
These are photorealistic, immersive 3D mesh models of real-world scenarios, along with high-resolution optical imageries. Covering over 2,500 global cities, it provides detailed visualizations of city buildings and geographical terrains. - Street views
This represents 360-degree panoramic views of streets, covering over 280 billion images across over 100 countries. - Earth Engine
This provides a planetary-scale analysis of satellite imagery and geospatial data, comprising over 90 petabytes of geospatial data for detailed analysis.
Enhancing Google Maps imagery with AI
As a technology, AI can transform massive volumes of geospatial data into actionable intelligence. Here’s how companies can utilize AI to create realistic, immersive imagery for a variety of applications:
- Photorealistic 3D mapping
With AI technology, enterprises can now create realistic 3D maps and models. AI-powered systems can merge thousands of 2D images from different angles and apply high-resolution texture to make the final 3D image look more realistic. - Object identification
Enterprises can use AI and computer vision technology to automatically identify and categorize real-world objects from Google Street View and satellite imagery. These objects include street signs, road signs, traffic lights, and utility assets like mobile towers and telephone poles. This enables them to monitor real-world environments and extract real-time data for various points of interest (POIs).
- Data processing and efficiency
Besides object recognition, AI can be used to automate manual tasks like image correction and color balancing. It can automatically run quality control to detect and correct image anomalies and blurring, thus improving the quality of maps.
- User experience
With AI-enhanced imagery, users now have an intuitive, immersive way to explore various locations. Besides, it can provide contextual information on the map, thus helping users to make informed decisions.
Real-world benefits of Google Maps’ Imagery Insights
Enterprises can implement the AI-enhanced Imagery Insights for improved ROI and other benefits, including:
- Elevated customer experience & engagement
Businesses across industries like real estate, retail, and hospitality can empower their customers to explore geographical locations “virtually” with Street View and 3D imagery. This facility can lead to higher customer engagement and even improve conversion rates. - Cost and operational efficiency
Logistics and distribution companies can use Imagery Insights to improve their logistics and route planning. Similarly, telecom & utility companies can “virtually” monitor their infrastructure and installed assets continuously without on-site visits. This reduces the cost of on-site visits and the frequency of asset failures.
- Product development and revenue streams
Location-based service providers can leverage the enhanced imagery for innovative services, such as augmented reality (AR). By analyzing real-time data, forward-looking companies can develop new data-powered products or services from valuable insights (for example, land use or traffic flow).
What’s next?
The arrival of Imagery Insights is a significant leap forward for Google Maps customers, who can leverage its visual imagery into an intelligent, queryable resource to manage their infrastructure. Additionally, its integration with Google BigQuery and Vertex AI opens new avenues for data-driven decisions and operational excellence.
As a Google Maps partner, Onix brings years of expertise in geospatial solutions for the benefit of its location-based customers. Are you looking for a reliable partner well-versed in Google Maps platform solutions? Contact our team today.
