Airbus selects Google Cloud for One Atlas basemap

Airbus Defence and Space has launched One Atlas, a new basemap streaming service delivering access to its satellite imagery over the world, fully refreshed within a 12-month period. It is powered by Google Cloud Platform.

This service is a major leap forward for enabling access to satellite imagery for customers by leveraging the power of Google Cloud Platform and Airbus Defence and Space technologies, Airbus Defence said.

A new approach in data storage, hosting and dissemination has been implemented using Google Cloud Platform to ingest the several hundred Terabytes of data annually required by One Atlas. This will bring value to clients for a wide range of applications such as infrastructure preparatory studies, land management, agricultural lands and crop-species mapping or even tree cover change detection in regions prone to deforestation.

“Our team at Google Cloud is dedicated to helping businesses find success with public cloud and innovative technologies, such as cloud machine learning. We’re excited to collaborate with Airbus Defence and Space to create new products and transform existing business models through the power of Google Cloud Platform,” said Carl Schachter, vice president of Google Cloud Platform.

Image from TerraSAR-X, a radar Earth observation satellite, of Barra da Tujica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (IMAGE: Airbus Defense and Space)

Google Cloud Platform was selected from seven public cloud providers because of its high-end technology, security resilience and strategic fit with Airbus Defence and Space’s business and development roadmap.

“All satellite data collected each day are automatically processed and made readily-accessible in a global imagery library that is stored in Google Cloud Platform,” said Bernhard Brenner, head of the Intelligence Business Cluster at Airbus Defense and Space. “Google Cloud Platform’s global scale, low latency and infrastructure capacities in Europe give us the required performance, flexibility and scalability for current and future data volumes, ensuring a high level of service for our customers.”

Additional investigations into the use of Google Cloud Platform and other Google tools are ongoing at Airbus Defence and Space, such as the integration of other datasets like TerraSAR-X radar data and WorldDEM into One Atlas, or the development of analytics services such as change detection and automatic object extraction. Very promising results have already been obtained from using Tensor Flow, an open source library for machine learning, and Cloud Machine Learning for automatic cloud detection.