The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) released a commercial solutions opening (CSO) seeking innovative commercial technologies to improve how it identifies and tracks changes to its Foundation geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, data.
Foundation GEOINT is NGA’s global geospatial framework describing the Earth’s physical and cultural characteristics and underpins intelligence, defense, civil, and commercial geospatial products and services. Maintaining that framework requires continually identifying and updating changes around the world, a process the agency says remains labor-intensive.
According to the solicitation, NGA is seeking artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision technologies that can automatically identify meaningful geospatial changes worldwide, reducing the need for analysts to manually define areas of interest before comparisons can be made.
NGA receives hundreds of validated mapping and geospatial update requirements each year, according to documents attached to the solicitation. Determining where meaningful changes have occurred remains a labor-intensive process because existing commercial change detection tools typically require analysts to manually identify areas of interest before comparisons can be made.
The agency is seeking commercially available or innovative technologies capable of producing vector-based indicators of change with accompanying metadata, including geographic location, date, source, areal extent, and confidence scores in open standard formats.
Under the CSO, all items, technologies, and services will be treated as commercial items.
Proposed solutions should support:
- Automated global-scale monitoring
- On-demand change analysis
- Rapid access to historical and current global imagery
- Detection of changes affecting smaller areas
- Continuous AI model improvement
According to the solicitation, the agency intends to obtain innovative solutions that meet its requirements, including existing technologies or procedures that are not currently in use and new applications of existing technologies, processes, or methods that enhance or streamline mission capabilities.
Responses to the CSO are due by July 21.