27 Jul UW–Madison cultivates new relationship with NGA
The University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) is excited to announce the release of its first project on the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Tearline open source intelligence platform, a pioneering analysis focused on small passenger vehicles in Hamhung, North Korea.
The CEAS Tearline project provides a detailed analysis of small passenger vehicles (SPVs) in Hamhung, North Korea’s second-largest city. By examining public and commercial satellite imagery and other open source intelligence (OSINT) sources, the project sheds light on the growth and distribution of small passenger vehicles in the city as an indicator of economic activity and development, and enables a revised estimate for the number of such vehicles in North Korea. The team used both computer vision (CV) techniques and manual counting to validate the results. UW–Madison’s Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) was used to train the CV model.
This project was conducted by students led by David Fields, CEAS associate director and scholar of US-Korean relations. It represents a significant advancement in the application of open source intelligence to provide valuable insights into one of the world’s most opaque regions.
Read the full story: University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for East Asian Studies Launches Open Source Intelligence Project with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Read the new Tearline report: North Korea: Passenger Vehicles Increasing on the Streets of Hamhung
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