How Big is the Drone Services Market?

According to the market research report ‘Global Drone Service Market Analysis & Trends – Industry Forecast to 2025’, the drone services market is estimated at US$4.4bn in 2019 and is projected to reach $63.6bn by 2025, at a CAGR of 55.9% from 2019 to 2025.

This is a huge opportunity for drone service providers. The key for capturing a share of this growing market is to offer turnkey business solutions beyond data capture, such as mapping, surveying and specialized geospatial analytics.

What are the Challenges of Geospatial Drone Services?

With more and more businesses relying on location data to optimize their day-to-day operations and planning or gain first-hand market insights. The drone services market grows due to the increasing demand for geospatial insights.

Business and industries which need of geospatial analytics are increasingly widespread.

Examples of Drone Service Uses:

• Farmers  - they need to know how many of their plants are underproductive. 
• Ranchers  - they need to know how many heads of cattle survived after a flood. 
• Insurance companies  - they need to know how many roofs were damaged during a storm.
• Electricity companies - they  need to know how many solar panels there are in a city.
• Oil companies - they need to detect oil spills.
• Water companies - they  need to know how many manhole covers are damaged or stolen.

The applications and use cases are potentially endless. All these businesses need  to be able to analyse the number and the location of each of the objects they’re tracking.

Most of the drone service providers we daily speak with excel at generating photogrammetry-based mapping and surveying products, however, delivering geospatial insights derived from these products can be challenging.

No one questions the potential value that these insight-rich geospatial products can add to their services, but they’re hard to scale.

Manually extracting the features clients are interested in is time-consuming and costly to scale up. Automating this process by hiring highly specialized professional-machine learning experts, computer vision specialists and data scientists, and investing in infrastructure is not an option for small and medium-size drone service businesses.

What’s a Solution for the Geospatial Drone Services Challenges?

A cost-effective solution to automate the feature extraction process and increase the geospatial analysis production capacity is to use Picterra, a cloud based A.I. object detection platform.

How does Picterra Help?

• 100x Faster – Reduce turnaround time & increase turnover
Firstly, not only can A.I. improve the accuracy of the project, but it can also reduce the time-to-delivery. The entire workload of mapping, detecting and extracting data can last days if being done manually. Instead, automated detection can execute faster with the power of Artificial Intelligence, shortening the delivery time from days to minutes. Furthermore, by being freed from the repetitive manual process, you the remaining time to work on a new project or acquire new clients.

• Save 10K $ per month for automated object detection – avoid unnecessary investment

Additionally, you don’t need to invest in infrastructure or R&D. GPUs and highly specialized expertise are expensive. For instance, several thousands of dollars are needed to use a high-end GPU virtual machine on cloud services. On top of which the expertise required in-house brings the expenses close to ten thousands of dollars per month. With our online platform, these are built-incomponents you can directly leverage on. With Picterra, you get state of the art machine learning algorithms and infrastructure without the need for extra expertise.

• One tool for all – Serve diverse markets with a single tool

Maximize your ROI by using a single tool for all your feature extraction projects. The versatility and flexibility of the object detection algorithms Picterra deploys, allows you to customize them and count objects such as trees, sheep, solar panels, shipping containers or buildings today. At the same time, you will be able to craft a detector for any other type of objects.

• Picterra provides 95% accuracy, beating human limitations

The A.I.-powered platform can detect objects faster and more efficiently than a human being. It can cover large areas and spot tens, hundreds or thousands of objects in the blink of an eye. In addition to the scale at which it can operate, A.I. can also improve the accuracy of the detections. Even the most meticulous person is bound to make mistakes while carrying out monotonous manual detection over large scale. This is where automation helps by learning features, performing the same steps accurately every time they are executed and focusing the human expertise on challenging and rare features.

• Picterra is five times cheaper vs manual detection – Reduce cost and labor intensity

The same heavy workload being repeated with every project requires more cost and labour intensity to deliver the results in time. In contrast, once created — automated detection can be executed again and again, without additional cost at a much faster pace. By integrating AI in the process, the overall timespan can be reduced which translates directly into cost savings.

• Picterra streamlines integration with your workflow

You can run AI object detection on orthophotos produced with any photogrammetry software in the market, such as Reality Capture, DroneDeploy, Agisoft Metashape, SimActive Correlator3D or Pix4Dmapper. Picterra allows you to analyze the detections, derive statistics and generate customized reports you can deliver to your clients. You can also export the detections as georeferenced layers in various formats that are optimized to match your workflow on ArcGIS and other GIS software.

• Train to detect anything in 10 minutes

Finally, the Picterra platform offers you an intuitive user interface to build and run your own detectors in just a few clicks.

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