If you watch many espionage or terrorism movies set in the present day, there’s usually a scene where some government employee enhances a satellite image to show a clear picture of the main villain’s face. Do modern spy satellites have that kind of resolution? We don’t know, and if we did we couldn’t tell you anyway. But we do know that even with unclassified resolution, scientists are using satellite imagery and machine learning to count things like elephant populations.
When you think about it, it is a hard problem to count wildlife populations in their habitat. First, if you go in person you disturb the target animals. Even a drone is probably going to upset timid wildlife. Then there is the problem with trying to cover a large area and figuring out if the elephant you see today is the same one as one you saw yesterday. If you guess wrong you will either undercount or overcount.
The Oxford scientists counting elephants used the Worldview-3 satellite. It collects up to 680,000 square kilometers every day. You aren’t disturbing any of the observed creatures, and since each shot covers a huge swath of territory, your problem of double counting all but vanishes.
Not Unique
Apparently, counting animals from space is nothing new. Brute force, you get a grad student to count from a picture. But automated methods work in certain circumstances. Everything from whales to penguins has been subject to counting from orbit, but typically using water or ice as a background.
There have even been efforts to deduce animal populations from secondary data. For example, penguin counts can be estimated by the stains the ..
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