Digitalglobe, Incorporated

Nathan Ricklin

Shay Har-Noy

Luke Barrington

A system for large-scale crowd sourcing of map data cleanup and correction, comprising an application server that generates image data, sends image data to a user device, receives tagging data provided by the device user, and provides tags to a crowdsourced search and locate server based on tagging data from a user device, a crowdsourced search and locate server that receives tags from an application server, computes agreement and disagreement values and performs expectation-maximization analysis, and a map data server that stores and provides map data, and a method for estimating location and quality of a set of geolocation data.

System and method for large scale crowdsourcing of map data cleanup and correction

A crowdsourced search and locate platform has been developed and put into practice. A plurality of geospatial images of a geographical region of interest are presented to a plurality of participants in an internet mediated crowdsourcing campaign for the purpose of identifying and tagging specific features of interest to the campaign administrator. An algorithm of the invention, CrowdRank, monitors the identification accuracy of the participants both absolute and compared to other participants calculating a score used to weight each identification made by that user. CrowdRank also chooses images to maximize campaign efficiency and calculates the confidence level of each feature identification.

Enhanced crowdsourced search and locate platform

A crowdsourced search and locate platform, comprising an application server that receives input from a plurality of user devices and navigates to a particular location, sends images of the location to a user device, and receives tagging data provided by the device user, and a client interface application that displays a plurality of interactive elements to a user, receive input from the user, and provide the results of the input to the application server, and methods for operating and administering a crowdsourced search and locate platform.

Crowdsourced feature identification and orthorectification

A crowdsourced search and locate platform, comprising an application server and a client interface application. The application server: receives connections from crowdsourcing participants; navigates a first crowdsourcing participant to a specific geospatial location; sends an image corresponding to the geospatial location to the first crowdsourcing participant; receives tagging data from the first crowdsourcing participant, the tagging data corresponding to a plurality of objects and locations identified by the first crowdsourcing participant. The client interface application: displays an image of a location; displays icons corresponding to objects that may be tagged; displays a navigation minimap adapted to allow a user to navigate; and upon the user's selecting a cursor location at which to place a new tag corresponding to a specific object type, displays a shape surrounding the cursor location, the effective radius of which is configurable and is adapted to define a region about the cursor location within which other tags by other users are considered to be in agreement with the new tag.

Crowdsourced image analysis platform

A crowdsourced search and locate platform, comprising an application server and a client interface application. The application server: receives connections from crowdsourcing participants; navigates a first crowdsourcing participant to a specific geospatial location; sends an image corresponding to the geospatial location to the first crowdsourcing participant; receives tagging data from the first crowdsourcing participant, the tagging data corresponding to a plurality of objects and locations identified by the first crowdsourcing participant. The client interface application: displays elements enabling an administrative user to configure a crowdsourced search and locate campaign; displays other elements enabling an administrative user to configure and run a crowdrank algorithm; and upon the user's selecting a particular object type icon, displays tags of the type selected by placing visual indicators at each tagged location of objects of the selected type within the plurality of image strips.

Crowdsourced search and locate platform

A crowdsourced search and locate platform, comprising an application server and a crowdrank server. The application server: receives connections from crowdsourcing participants; navigates a first crowdsourcing participant to a specific geospatial location; sends an image corresponding to the geospatial location to the first crowdsourcing participant; receives tagging data from the first crowdsourcing participant, the tagging data corresponding to a plurality of objects and locations identified by the first crowdsourcing participant. The crowdrank server: retrieves a plurality of tags made by participating users computes agreement and disagreement values for each of the plurality of retrieved tags; performs an expectation-maximization or expectation-minimization process iteratively until a configured maximum number of iterations is performed or until an indicia of rate of change between iterations falls below a configured threshold; and provides resulting output values corresponding to geolocations of objects of a plurality of types to an administrative user.

A system for geolocation of social media posts, comprising a social search engine; a geolocation software module; and a network-attached database comprising at least a media storage and a metadata storage. The social search engine retrieves a plurality of social media content postings and stores them in the database; and the geolocation software module geolocates a first social media content posting by: extracting metadata from the posting; extracting embedded location data from the posting; identifying an author of the posting; determining if the metadata storage contains location-related data about the author, if one was identified; determining if author location data is available; identifying any known place names in the social media content posting; disambiguating a plurality of locations obtained; and geotagging the posting and storing the resulting geotagged posting in the metadata storage.

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Boulder, CO, United States of America

Nathan Ricklin