Anthony Lockly found himself in a unique position a few years ago to combine his undergraduate education in economics and finance from Cornell University and his graduate geographical information systems education from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee into one entity.
In October 2018, Lockly, who has lived in Milwaukee for most of his life, formed Loc8 (pronounced like locate), a software development and distribution company providing patent-pending technology to users to analyze digital images from any still or video camera. Lockly is the owner, co-founder and CEO.
The business officially launched in April 2019. Lockly formed the company in partnership with experts in location technology.
Lockly has worked in commercial property valuation as a fee appraiser for 35 years, and as a commercial property assessor for 19 different communities in Wisconsin. He also has worked as a real estate broker and investment consultant for 35 years. An owner of a separate Milwaukee appraisal firm, Loc8 was an opportunity to apply his finance and business management knowledge to a tech company.
Loc8's technology analyzes colors at the individual pixel level, the smallest unit of measurement for any digital image, to detect and identify objects and people. It processes 1,000 20-megapixel images in less than five minutes, which is the equivalent of four images per second, eliminating the challenge of relying on an individual’s level of fatigue and color detection, Lockly said. The process of analyzing that many colors would take 33 hours for a skilled image analyst, called a “squint” analyst, at a speed of one image every two minutes, Lockly said.
The images can be collected from cameras mounted on drones, manned aircraft, or satellites. Loc8 can analyze images from cameras that produce images using visible color, radiometric thermal, non-visible infrared, multispectral, or hyperspectral wavelengths.
And as drone programs expand around the globe, the volume of aerial imagery collected grows exponentially, Lockly said.
"Loc8 was designed to address this expanding need for image analysis and data mining," he said.
Loc8's technology is used for law enforcement, firefighting, emergency management, precision agriculture, wildlife conservation, infrastructure inspection and surface mining, with the core users involved in search and rescue operations, Lockly said. Loc8 also has partnered with multiple universities, including Purdue University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Texas State University, for research and development of additional applications for its core patent-pending algorithms.
The Milwaukee startup currently is performing just south of $1 million in annual revenue, but has a growing list of potential users that consist of more than 900 individuals and more than 800 organizations, Lockly said. Loc8 has installed users throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Italy, Switzerland and several Caribbean nations, he said.
"It's expanding beyond where we initially thought," Lockly said.
