Contextual Enrichment of Remote-Sensed Events with Social Media Streams

Abstract

The availability of satellite images for academic or commercial purpose is increasing rapidly due to efforts made by governmental agencies (NASA, ESA) to publish such data openly or commercial startups (PlanetLabs) to provide real-time satellite data. Beyond many commercial application, satellite data is helpful to create situation awareness in disaster recovery and emergency situations such as wildfires, earthquakes, or flooding. To fully utilize such data sources, we present a scalable system for the contextual enrichment of satellite images by crawling and analyzing multimedia content from social media. This information stream can provide vital information from the ground and help to complement remote sensing in situations. We use Twitter as main data source and analyze its textual, visual, temporal, geographical and social dimensions. Visualizations show different aspects of the event allowing high-level comprehension and provide deeper insights into the event as complemented by social media.