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There's a lot of smart people on HN, so it's worth asking.

Would it be possible to detect water theft from satellite imagery?

I don't know enough about any of this, but besides the obvious difficulty (trying to measure a 3D object with 2D imagery), water flow in Australia is inconsistent at best. I don't even know what kind of historical data we have available.

Anyone interested? My email is in my bio

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Former head of tech at water data startup In California here. Imo the data on water rights is way too messy and complicated to do this. Also there are things like private canals, utility owned canals, in addition to govt aqueducts. Utilities release water for lots of reasons. It is as much a data quality and secrecy problem as a computer vision or sensor problem.

Things in Australia are a lot more centralized. It seems like Australia would be one of the best places to try.

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