Sharper Shape, a Finland-based company, is bringing its successful utility asset management system Sharper CORE to North America. The company has been creating digital twins of utility corridors in Europe using imagery, lidar, and AI in a cloud-based application to facilitate the immediate needs of all utility stakeholders. Now with an office and multiple sensors in California, the team has recently captured and processed over 8 million nadir images covering 34,000 miles of corridor for a California utility. Merging such large amounts of data and processing them into one comprehensive base layer to support the creation of digital twins takes a lot of planning and processing power. SimActive’s Correlator3D, hosted on the AWS cloud with multiple virtual machines for distributed processing, efficiently processes massive image datasets.
INDUSTRY
Surveying
COUNTRY
United States
USE CASE
Processing large datasets using distributed processing
CHALLENGES
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Capturing and processing large datasets quickly
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Maximizing computing power
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Minimizing hands-on processing
BENEFITS
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Cloud-based workflow fits with Sharper Shape’s CORE environment
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Distributed processing efficiently handles large datasets within the processing pool
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Scripting capabilities eliminate repetitive tasks on similar projects
“When working with such large datasets where even managing SSDs becomes a challenge, it is great to be able to allocate processing tasks over multiple machines in our AWS cloud environment. Correlator3D is the right tool when it comes to processing large datasets efficiently”.
- Perti Rauhakallio, Vice President, Business Development, Sharper Shape.
WORKFLOW
Using multiple helicopters, corridor projects are broken up into acquisition segments. The helicopters are deployed with dual sensors to collect imagery and lidar. The data are then uploaded as captured into the AWS hosting environment where Correlator3D resides. Precise positioning and angular information from the ABGPS and IMU are applied to both datasets in the initial processing. This is used to perform AT as part of the image processing workflow. A surface generated from the lidar is also imported and used as part of the ortho-mosaicking process. Once processing is complete, the resulting data is checked for quality and prepared for further AI-related extraction as per clients' specifications. With larger datasets, successful processing workflows are duplicated and scripted for processing additional blocks or segments as they become available.
DELIVERABLES
Sharper Shape’s CORE Digital Twin, a cloud-based application, is designed to allow all stakeholders access to the data they specifically need. Base layers such as digital elevation models, orthomosaics and colorized lidar point clouds provide the geospatial component for their AI-derived products.
BENEFITS
According to Sharper Shape, the benefits of using Correlator3D are its ease of use, operation in a cloud-hosted environment with distributed processing over multiple machines and the ability to script common workflows.
ABOUT SHARPER SHAPE
Developed with utilities, for utilities, Sharper Shape offers a holistic and proactive approach to utility asset and vegetation management. Bringing together typically siloed processes, Sharper Shape has transformed inspection automation, applying AI and machine learning to unlock otherwise impossible efficiencies and deliver sharper intelligence for a safer world. For more information, visit www.sharpershape.com.