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Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

nbremer.github.io

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Re: Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

#101

Post by dougmwne »

gjstein wrote: post #100
dougmwne wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way, not even close. At this point Google is doing overhead lidar flights to get incredibly details 3d maps. The Planet imagry is like going back several decades in satellite tech. But on the other hand, it's daily.

Do you have a source for "overhead LIDAR flights"? I was under the impression that data was coming almost exclusively from their StreetView cars (with perhaps a few companies that provide helicopter-based data from time to time). True enough though that Google has a staggering amount of data about the earth.

My apologies. I remembered incorrectly. The aerial flights use computer vision to extract depth maps. While aerial LIDAR is used in GIS, I could not find LIDAR mentioned connected with Google's aerial imagery.

https://blog.google/products/earth/google-earths-incredible-...

Re: Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

#102

Post by thejj100100 »

gjstein wrote: post #100
dougmwne wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way, not even close. At this point Google is doing overhead lidar flights to get incredibly details 3d maps. The Planet imagry is like going back several decades in satellite tech. But on the other hand, it's daily.

Do you have a source for "overhead LIDAR flights"? I was under the impression that data was coming almost exclusively from their StreetView cars (with perhaps a few companies that provide helicopter-based data from time to time). True enough though that Google has a staggering amount of data about the earth.

Yeah we had a motorhome outside our house and I looked at the 3D map and it showed even though street view car hasn’t visited since 2013. A few months later it updated and showed without the motorhome yet gain without streetview car.

Re: Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

#103

Post by [deleted] »

whatshisface wrote: post #98

For the people commenting on the Firefox+Linux issue: it doesn't work for me, and this is the error I get: > Refused to create native OpenGL context because of blacklist entry: FEATURE_FAILURE_OLD_NVIDIA So the real combination is Old NVIDIA drivers + Linux + Firefox. (Maybe not even Firefox, the issue might be inseparable from my old card. I'm not going to try it on Chromium.) The question is, why is my card blackli…

[deleted]

Re: Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

#104

Post by [deleted] »

softwarelimits wrote: post #70

Absolutely great, I am sure we will need these kind of visualizations to survive. But the planet needs a JavaScript programming competition with the challenge of minimizing CPU load of such fantastic presentations. It would be so good to have one golden path to browser animations with the lowest energy consumption, one default framework that will be easy to use without deep knowledge of browser quirks and JavaScript…

[deleted]

Re: Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

#105

Post by patrickyeon »

crazygringo wrote: post #92

Super cool! I wonder why both clouds and ocean show up as black instead of as actual white and blue imagery respectively. Are they saving money and bandwidth by not sending back "useless" imagery? Or something else?

(I used to work at planet, this is my recollection of what was the case then)

Usually, for ocean-sized bodies of water, we'd stop imaging entirely to reduce power load and align the solar panels with the sun. Effectively all of the ocean had nothing going on on the surface that we could image anyway.

When Planet gets the imagery, they have a fairly good sense of where it is, but it is still processed to get it to align with ground truth, which is called rectification and relies on matching visible features to known ground features. If the entire image is clouds, this can't work and they don't publish the image because they can't say exactly where it is. Also, there's not really usable information in that imagery I guess.

Re: Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

#106

Post by patrickyeon »

azernik wrote: post #55
NietTim wrote: post #50

Can we receive the signal from these satellites ourselves like we can with the NOAA satellites?

Telemetry, probably; imagery, definitely not. (They sell this imagery, it's not public information like NOAA data.)

Telemetry and command and control signals are also encrypted.

Re: Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

#107

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

dougmwne wrote: post #79
bainsfather wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is he resolution like? Is it as good as Google's aerial imagery that they show with their maps? (or Bing's)

No way, not even close. At this point Google is doing overhead lidar flights to get incredibly details 3d maps. The Planet imagry is like going back several decades in satellite tech. But on the other hand, it's daily.

Google imagery is a wide range of 10-100cm imagery. I believe (top of my head) that the planet data is natively 25 centimeters (7-8 band?).

Re: Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

#108

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

stronglikedan wrote: post #96
joshvm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Bing and Google use aerial imagery with centimetre-scale resolution (certainly 25cm). PlanetScope is 3m I think, the totally free stuff like Sentinel 2 is 10m (5 day revisit). The best commercial imaging satellites are <0.5m. Below that it's simpler to use aircraft.

3, 5, and 0.72 meter resolution [0] [0] https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/

I'm pretty sure they've got a 25 cm offering as well.

Re: Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

#109

Post by samirm »

haditab wrote: post #32
mbrumlow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could track the satellite could you not shine a laser, or bright light (maybe a mirror reflecting the sun) directly at the camera to mess up the imaging while over your region?

And if an aircraft flies over your property you could get charged with a federal offense (pointing a laser at an aircraft).

Doesn't really matter if you're across the globe...
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