Using the Picterra Platform

For the sake of demonstration let’s focus our efforts on 25 of UC Santa Cruz’s orthomosaics (that’s 50 days of manual counting work) taken over the year of 2018. We start by uploading these 25 orthos to the platform. You can do this in ‘My Images’ in the Dashboard, from which we’ll create a folder and upload our orthomosaics to this folder.

Creating your detector

Once they’ve been uploaded we can click on ‘My Detectors’ and ‘Create a new Custom Detector’ to start training our Seal & Sea Lion detector.

Name your custom detector.

After clicking ‘Create’ you’ll see that the first step here is to add images that we want to use for training our detector from our image collection. Let’s start with just a few for now. We click ‘Add to Training’ for each of these images and then ‘Start Training’ to start the training detector mode.

Choose which images to use for training, then click ‘Start Training’ at the top left

Now in training detector mode, we can start providing some examples to Picterra’s AI, giving it examples of what to look for and what not to look for. The purpose of this article is not to be a tutorial on how to train a custom detector (for which we have a tutorial here) but to show you how your custom detector can be easily applied at scale on the platform. Thus we’ll just show you examples of a few of training areas and annotations we’ve created. This process, including training iteration of reviewing intermediate results and improving our annotations, took in total about 3 hours.

Some of the training areas and annotations we’ve created to train our ‘Seal & Sea Lion Counter’ with. Note that the left area has no annotation, meaning these won’t be detected and are acting as counter examples.

Running your detector at scale

Now how do we run our trained detector on the rest of our images? From our training detector mode we can click ‘Run Detector’ to go into ‘Detector Mode’ for the current detector, from which you will be shown your image collection. Entering the folder in which you uploaded your images you’ll see all your images with option to run the current detector on each image. Running it on these images is just as simple as clicking ‘Detect’ on each of your images. Note that in the future we plan on adding the ability to click ‘Detect’ directly on a folder to run detections for the entire folder contents at once (even less clicking!).

Your requests to detect will be queued up on our servers after which it’s just a matter of waiting. Detection across each image (30k by 20k pixels) takes on average 5 minutes so it will take about 2 hours to complete. You can check the status your detections on each raster in the ‘Status’ column.

Images being processed by the detector. Per raster results can be viewed as they are completed from the Stats & Report button on the right. They can also always be viewed from ‘My Images’ in the Dashboard.

Now to view all of your results, we can go to ‘My Images’ in the Dashboard and click on the ‘Results’ button next to your folder. This brings up the ‘Stats & Report mode’ and from here you can view all of your results across each of your images, download the results files and even generate a small PDF report on each image. Here’s what the results look like!