Geospatial Computer Vision Group

Do you know where the food you eat grows? Or do you know how much the river paths in your city have changed? Would you be interested in knowing, what are the most walkable paths in your city? Or where most accidents happen?

“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.” - Kofi Annan

We live in a highly interconnected world. The electricity we use is often generated hundreds of kilometres away in a power plant, the food often travels thousands of kilometres before entering our homes and even the homes are built with cement manufactured thousands of kilometres away. In such interconnectedness, we often lose touch with how we’re using the environment in which we live. In this group, we would like to understand these interconnected aspects and promote mindful and sustainable usage of resources while ensuring economic prosperity for all.

Satellites provide a picture of the entire world and in this picture, it captures a lot that is happening in the world; Farmers growing crops, cities building roads, people migrating places, rivers changing paths, water bodies changing color, forests being cut and much more. We want to capture these changes through our strength in Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Systems methods.

We would like to derive insights about different aspects of our lives, both in urban and rural settings. We would like to understand how cities function, where does the waste go, where does the water come from, how do people travel in the city, etc. In rural areas, we would like to understand the village’s land use, optimization of agricultural practices, development of new projects, etc. We would also develop an understanding of the natural resources, how the forests, rivers and lakes around us evolve. This information will empower decision makers, governments to make policies that keep the interconnectedness of the entire ecological system in mind and the public to take decisions regarding their lifestyles and vocations.

Our current projects are in:

  1. Agriculture Preparing systems for information aid to farmers and district level managers. We use satellite images and multispectral drones in conjuction with ground experiments. Most of our current work is with the Sugarcane crop. We’re working on computer vision models for stress and yield and systemic models for interactions with various elements such as soil health, weather, etc.

  2. Urban Planning Systems to monitor land use, roofs, trees, lakes, etc. in cities across India (and eventually, the world) based on remote sensing data. We are working on various aspects including heat island modeling, tree cover tracking, etc. in urban planning. One of our current project is assessing how walkable our cities are.

See live demos for

Team

We call the people of the group GeoVisionaries :-)

Faculty

  1. Anupam Sobti

Collaborators

  1. Agriculture: Shashank Tamaskar, Aaditeshwar Seth
  2. Clean Energy/Urban Climate: Vishal Garg
  3. Water Security: Sandeep Manjanna

Research Fellows

  1. Sambal Shikhar
  2. Varchita Lalwani
  3. Moti Rattan Gupta

Students

  1. Aman Sa
  2. Anshika Srivastava
  3. Yash Srivastava
  4. Prachi Parakh
  5. Vaishnavi Rathi
  6. Nishant Mahajan
  7. Liza Wahi
  8. Amog Rao
  9. Pranjal Rastogi
  10. Arman Ghosh
  11. Sakarth Brar
  12. Yash Sangtani
  13. Bilawal Deu
  14. Hibah Ihsan Muhammad
  15. Bhavi
  16. Anshul Rana
  17. Rishi Vijaywargiya

Join Us

Currently, we have 1 opening for Plaksha Research Fellow. Apply here.