It's been three months since the heroic confrontation of Ukraine against Russian aggression started. All this time we are adapting to the new reality and doing our best to gain victory. Throughout the war, the IT industry provided the country with new developments and technologies to support the army, government and its people. The guys from NeuroMarket are not an exception.
NeuroMarket is a marketplace created by Ukrainians to make neural networks easy to access. A special feature of the project is to make neural networks available for integration into any product or infrastructure of the business. The company provides ready-made artificial intelligence solutions to satisfy business needs.
Combining extensive experience and AI community support it was decided to create a UADamage project - an online map of Ukraine's damages in cities and villages.
The key feature of UADamage is the automated analysis of the infrastructure damages done by artificial intelligence. This technology allows data processing to be done dramatically faster than a regular manual approach. UADamage uses a neural network pipeline, it examines the level of damage to each building comparing satellite images done before the war and nowadays. The system classifies the damages according to the following criteria:
- objects without visible damage
- objects that have suffered minor damage
- objects with major damage
- destroyed objects.
Automated object classification is transformed into geojson format and uploaded to an interactive map.
So far, 43,803 buildings in Mariupol have been analyzed. Over the last 7 weeks, many experiments and improvements have been made to the operation system - each subsequent iteration takes less time, and the processed data becomes more accurate. With a powerful server, the city area of 50 km2 can be analyzed in minutes. The accuracy of the calculations continue to increase, as the project development team constantly trains neuro networks with new data that is being previously validated manually.
Our next steps directly depend on the availability of satellite photos, because they are very difficult to find during the war. The UADamage team is looking forward to work closely with the Ministry of Digital Transformation, EOS and TVIS-INFO. As for the verification of data, the plans are to involve the entire population of Ukraine in the project and give everyone a tool to verify and supply additional data to complete the infrastructure damage. In this way, everyone can contribute to the reconstruction of our country.
Vitaliy Lopushkansky (founder of NeuroMarket and UADamage) comments that, of course, UADamage is not the only project that is actively involved in damage analysis. However, our goal is to unite our efforts and move forward together to a complete and accurate analysis of the whole country. The next steps would be to attract investments, cooperate with construction companies and find materials for the reconstruction of every piece of land destroyed by the invaders during the war.
The project team consists of 15 people who work every day with AI and system improvements. Currently, project participants are all volunteers. However, there is a lot of work ahead and ambitious plans to fulfill, so support is extremely important (not only financial but also informational).
If you have the opportunity to support the project financially, you can use the link: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=P9V3T3P3WWKNJ