VANCOUVER, British Columbia – 3v Geomatics, Inc. (3vG) is pleased to announce that it has joined the NVIDIA Inception program. Becoming a part of the program will assist 3vG in the development of programming languages and methodologies necessary to monitor the impact of climate change to the Earth’s surface.
3vG specializes in interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), a remote sensing radar satellite-based technology that detects and monitors ground and structure movement over time. NVIDIA GPUs allow for thousand-fold increases in the processing speed of InSAR images. Earlier this year, 3vG won a climate change-related Earth observation project from the Canadian Space Agency to develop InSAR algorithms that will map and monitor displacement across the entire Canadian Arctic.
“Our climate is in a state of emergency and measuring the stability of our Arctic permafrost is of immediate importance. The Canadian North contains countless small communities that are being affected by shifting buildings, airports, and other critical infrastructure. Climate change-related subsidence can prevent food and other critical supplies from being flown into isolated northern communities,” said Adrian McCardle, 3vG’s co-founder and CEO.
3vG was founded in 2007, and has rapidly grown over the last 12 years to become the market leader in near real-time InSAR analyses. Each satellite image covers thousands of square kilometers, with a stack of images containing billions of pixels that are monitored over time. The sheer scale of these processing demands led to programming challenges and hardware limitations. NVIDIA GPUs have fundamentally transformed the InSAR industry in both scale and speed.
Prior to using NVIDIA GPUs, InSAR analyses of even small areas would take weeks, sometimes months. “We would collect images for 6 months, then it would take us 3 months to analyze those images and deliver results, only to tell our client that they had a landslide 5 weeks ago,” said Parwant Ghuman, CTO of 3vG. “The usefulness of these results were limited. Now, with the implementation of dozens of GPUs into our servers, we are delivering updated displacement results within hours of each new satellite image acquisition, allowing clients to understand in near real-time where landslides and other geohazards are developing. Basically, leveraging GPUs enables InSAR to deliver actionable intelligence. This transformation is now saving lives and preventing large-scale environmental accidents.”
The next wave of innovation for InSAR involves the implementation of deep learning and AI algorithms. 3vG has teamed up with the Canadian Space Agency and NVIDIA to accelerate adoption of these critical technologies for the benefit of the environment.
NVIDIA Inception is a virtual accelerator program that helps startups during critical stages of product development, prototyping and deployment. Every Inception member gets a custom set of ongoing benefits, including NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute credits, marketing support, and hardware technology discounts enabling early-stage startups with fundamental tools to help them grow.
About 3v Geomatics:
3vG was founded in 2007 with the mission of making InSAR an easily accessible and useful technology for a broad base of users. We work with the world’s largest mining, oil & gas, and pipeline companies to detect the early onset of landslides and other geohazards for the protection of the environment, and the safety of our client’s people and assets.
