Concept: Teaxas’s tech startup Terradepth has rolled out an Ocean-Data-as-a-Service platform named Absolute Ocean (AO) to map the world’s oceans. AO is a cloud-based and browser-accessible ocean data management platform that offers s the ability to simultaneously manage existing customer-owned datasets and access subscription-based Terradepth data.

Nature of Disruption: AO supports a wide array of geospatial data types including side-scan sonar, synthetic-aperture sonar, multibeam bathymetry, satellite-derived bathymetry, lidar, magnetometer, 2D- and 3D-point cloud and satellite imagery. It offers an intuitive and immersive interface that enables the visualization of high-resolution, vast geospatial datasets. The cloud-based platform also includes a variety of tools and robust search features for the cataloging of metadata associated with each data source. ML pipelines developed by Terradepth within AO enable automatic target recognition. It leverages deep-learning neural networks power sonar-data analysis to provide predictions that are more accurate than those of individual models. The platform enables data management including sharing of user-uploaded data broadly with the community or private access with access control. It enables rapid data quality assurance analysis with four-dimensional data-visualization capabilities with multiple measurements and annotation tools. The ocean data management platform conducts exploration of three-dimensional worldwide ocean datasets and narrows the results by location and time.

Outlook: Underwater environments have always fascinated the customers and they enjoy viewing and reading about the environment. However, at present, there is a lack of an immersive interface that can enable the customers to view the various underwater data sets in high resolution. Terradepth claims that its Ocean-Data-as-a-Service platform AO helps to scale ocean data collection and dissemination, enabling everyone to explore the planet’s underwater environment like never before. The startup claims that it is ready-made for organizations across different industries, including ports and shallow-water hydrography, offshore renewable energy, subsea telecommunications, LiDAR, academia, and defense.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk