In 1993, geophysicist Gerry Mitchell launched RGI Industries to provide remote sensing technology and consulting services on geospatial solutions.
Over the next three decades, Mitchell’s company would evolve considerably, including a rebrand to PhotoSat.
Being a tech-forward firm, evolution at PhotoSat parallels advances in technology. By 2003, satellite data enabled PhotoSat to develop a geophysical processing system to create topographic maps from stereo satellite imagery.
Within a few years, PhotoSat was able to improve the precision of its methods to achieve engineering-grade accuracy. As a result, major oil and gas companies such as Suncor began to tap PhotoSat for its topography tech.
But advances in tech did not stop there. Come 2018, artificial intelligence was already gaining steam. PhotoSat’s software development team thus added deep learning technology to their toolkit, applying the tech to “all data processing systems, including elevation surveying and alteration mapping.”
Today, PhotoSat offers spectral matching, which combines spectral imagery with deep learning to reliably identify more than a dozen key minerals, including alunite, kaolinite, and jarosite.
A UBC alumnus, Mitchell remains active with PhotoSat as Company Director, having served his company as President up until 2021. Leading the team today is chief executive officer Andrea Krupa, who says modern technological advances are a boon for industries.
“We’re eliminating a significant amount of fieldwork,” Krupa recently informed Business in Vancouver. “And we’re also eliminating this seasonal dependency. A geologist can get the alteration mineral map and work on it when there’s snow on the ground.”
Krupa points BIV journalist Nelson Bennett toward an example: “We’ve recently done a job which was almost half of Northern Argentina.” In this case, placing ground troops onsite is not an economically feasible use of resources—”There’s just too much area to cover.”
A more local example is work around the Golden Triangle in Northwestern B.C.
“A lot of these companies will be looking at hundreds of square kilometres of area,” Krupa explained. “So what they want to do is they want to use these fully-remote satellite-based data sets to be able to target and pinpoint where they want to put their efforts.”
Since ’93, PhotoSat has completed more than 3,000 projects across 75 countries.
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