Since 2012, the London Legacy Development Corporation has gradually transformed the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from an essential local green space into a high-density residential hub driven by foreign investment. The before-and-after aerial imagery above provides a striking illustration of how the landscape of the Olympic ‘park’ is being built over.

This before and after image was created in a matter of seconds by GeoWhisperer. GeoWhisperer is a new tool from Henk van Ess that attempts to take some of the guesswork out of comparing satellite imagery. Designed for OSINT researchers, journalists and visual mappers, it automatically searches historical satellite imagery and uses AI to identify physical changes between different dates.

Enter a location using coordinates, a place name or a map link and GeoWhisperer searches Esri’s World Imagery Wayback archive for suitable aerial imagery. You can also upload your own recent geotagged photograph (with the image being processed locally in your browser).

GeoWhisperer then uses AI to identify what has changed between the different dates. It divides the area into a 3×3 grid and examines each section separately, looking for changes in physical features while accounting for distractions such as parked cars, shadows, seasonal variations and differences in image quality. The AI is restricted to reporting changes that can actually be seen in the imagery rather than speculating about what caused them (as I have done in my intro above).

Each identified change is accompanied by an evidence card and links to other mapping and research resources. The results can then be exported as a side-by-side image (as in this post), as a short video comparison or as a one-page PDF report. 

Via: Webcurios

Maps Mania