Press

Press Kit

Summary
Terrapattern is an interface for finding "more like this, please" in satellite photos. Simply click an interesting spot on Terrapattern's map, and it will find other locations that look similar. Terrapattern is particularly useful for locating things that aren't usually indicated on maps. We think Terrapattern is important because it's open-source, open-access, and open-ended.

Terrapattern can be briefly described as "a visual search engine for satellite imagery", "similar-image search for satellite photos", or "a prototype for visual query-by-example in satellite imagery". We hope it will help citizen scientists, humanitarians, journalists, and other curious people to discover "patterns of interest".

Technically, the project uses a Deep Convolutional Neural Net (DCNN) to assist with image recognition. For more information, please read our About page and our FAQ. For examples of related and prior work, please see our References page.

Terrapattern is an open-source project created by a collaborative team of artists, creative technologists, and students. Terrapattern is not a company or startup; it is an experimental research prototype, developed in a university setting, whose purpose is to present a new way of exploring, understanding, and organizing the world. Terrapattern went live on May 24th, 2016.

Press Images
We maintain an archive of high-resolution images in this Flickr archive: http://flic.kr/s/aHskzPzVE7. These images are available under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Credits
We kindly request that the press list the creators of Terrapattern as "Golan Levin, David Newbury, and Kyle McDonald with (Carnegie Mellon students) Irene Alvarado, Aman Tiwari, and Manzil Zaheer". Wherever possible, it should be mentioned that "Terrapattern was developed at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, with support from the from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Prototype Fund." For more information about the creators of Terrapattern, see our Team page.

Citations
When citing this project in bibliographies, please use:
Levin, G., Newbury, D., McDonald, K., Alvarado, I., Tiwari, A., and Zaheer, M. "Terrapattern: Open-Ended, Visual Query-By-Example for Satellite Imagery using Deep Learning". http://terrapattern.com, 24 May 2016.

Contact
To contact the creators, please email contact@terrapattern.com.