WESTMINSTER, Colo. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — May 29, 2018 — DigitalGlobe, a Maxar Technologies company (formerly MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.) (NYSE: MAXR; TSX: MAXR), announced today the commercial release of GBDX Notebooks, allowing customers to easily extract valuable insight they want from DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data platform, ( GBDX), eliminating the heavy lifting that accompanies managing satellite imagery at scale.

GBDX Notebooks leverages the familiar open source Jupyter Notebooks environment to provide access to DigitalGlobe’s 18-year, 100 PB library of high-resolution, multispectral imagery, as well as pre-built machine learning and remote sensing algorithms. In addition to three e-commerce subscription levels, GBDX Notebooks offers a community tier, furnishing customers with ready access to the latest imagery from NASA’s Landsat satellite, ESA’s Sentinel satellite, DigitalGlobe’s Open Data Program, and DigitalGlobe’s complete IKONOS archive. DigitalGlobe’s IKONOS satellite, the world’s first commercial satellite launched in 1999, has a 15-year imagery library and it’s the only sub-meter satellite imagery accessible for the creation of open source algorithms. All algorithms developed within the community tier are available as open source.

Using one of the three available e-commerce tiers, customers can develop and run at scale proprietary algorithms, Maxar-developed algorithms, or open source algorithms, including:

1. Mapping Navigable Airspace for Drones: By combining DigitalGlobe’s imagery, digital surface models, a tree detection model, and Ecopia Building Footprints powered by DigitalGlobe, this GBDX Notebook visualizes obstructions that would impact the flight paths of drones and UAVs, solving a key problem for the emerging drone and UAV navigation sectors.
2. Assessing Forest Fire Risk to Buildings: Calculating by hand the fire risk for every building in a city would be a time-consuming task. This GBDX Notebook combines high-resolution satellite imagery, building footprints, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to determine plant health, a tree detection model, and defensible space standards to quickly identify which buildings would have a high risk of burning in the event of a wildfire, helping a city determine where to focus its fire mitigation efforts.
3. Change Detection for Boat Traffic: This GBDX Notebook combines feature extraction, change detection over time, and open source weather data to find business insights from imagery, specifically helping businesses identify when to expect more customers.

“DigitalGlobe is committed to helping customers unlock valuable insights from our powerful data by applying machine learning to solve complex problems facing businesses, including the insurance, automotive, energy, and technology industries,” said Amy Minnick, DigitalGlobe Senior Vice President and General Manager of Commercial.

“DigitalGlobe developed GBDX Notebooks to encourage more people, like developers, data scientists, imagery scientists, and machine learning and deep learning researchers, to extract location intelligence from satellite imagery, enabling commercial customers to make business decisions with confidence, faster, and at scale,” said Dr. Shay Har-Noy, DigitalGlobe Vice President of Unified Platform. “By gifting the IKONOS archive to science, we anticipate wider adoption of satellite imagery as a foundational data layer within the machine learning community and with customers.”

GBDX Notebooks is a new and powerful component of a comprehensive machine learning platform for satellite imagery providing training data, an imagery chipping service, labeling tools, and high-speed imagery inference. Maxar’s DigitalGlobe has released a series of GBDX Notebooks tutorials. Read the first tutorial here, and for opportunities to participate in early access to future machine learning capabilities, sign up here.

GBDX Notebooks will also be available as a demo in DigitalGlobe’s booth at the Locate Conference in San Francisco on May 30–31, 2018.

About DigitalGlobe

DigitalGlobe is the global leader in commercial high-resolution satellite imagery used by decision makers to better understand our changing planet in order to save lives, resources, and time. Sourced from the world's leading constellation, our imagery solutions deliver unmatched coverage and capacity to meet our customers’ most demanding mission requirements. Each day customers in defense and intelligence, public safety, civil agencies, map making and analysis, environmental monitoring, oil and gas exploration, infrastructure management, navigation technology, and providers of location-based services depend on DigitalGlobe data, information, technology, and expertise to gain actionable insight. DigitalGlobe is a Maxar Technologies company (NYSE: MAXR; TSX: MAXR). For more information visit www.digitalglobe.com.

About Maxar Technologies

Maxar Technologies (formerly MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates) is a leading global provider of advanced space technology solutions for commercial and government markets including satellites, Earth imagery, robotics, geospatial data, and analytics. As a trusted partner, Maxar Technologies provides unmatched integrated capabilities, solutions, and expertise to help customers anticipate and address their most complex mission-critical challenges with confidence. With more than 6,500 employees in over 31 locations, the Maxar Technologies portfolio of commercial space brands includes MDA, SSL, DigitalGlobe, and Radiant Solutions. Every day, billions of people rely on Maxar Technologies to communicate, share information and data, and deliver insights that Build a Better World. Maxar trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange as MAXR. For more information, visit www.maxar.com .