Satellite google maps series#

Orbital Insight is a geospatial big data company using deep learning to discover social, economic and agricultural trends through satellite-image analysis. Mapillary is famous for being the open-data alternative for Google Street View but is slowly being an enterprise player in the infrastructure monitoring market and are also part of Esri’s startup program. Municipalities and non-profit organizations have used it to improve infrastructure in cities around the globe. The technology empowers users to decide which streets, roads and hidden paths should be mapped. Machine vision stitches photos together in 3D to create immersive ground level maps in real-time. Mapillary is a platform for crowdsourced and street-level map photos. With the latest FAA rules for commercial drones opening up the commercial drone industry, PrecisionHawk is well poised to showcase the potential of drone data analytics! In April this year, PrecisionHawk announced that it has raised 18M USD to further its data acquisition and analysis business and later announced a partnership with DJI and MunichRE for insurance. Drones are going to have one of the biggest impacts especially with regard to Precision Agriculture and environmental monitoring. It brings value to an emerging market by offering an end-to-end solution for aerial data gathering, processing and analysis to provide actionable information across a wide range of data-intensive civilian industries. PrecisionHawk combines unmanned aerial systems, artificial intelligence and remote sensing technologies to improve business operations and day-to-day decision making. On average 70 percent of our planet is constantly covered by clouds but from time to time every place is finally sunny. Mosaicking joins the gapless and cloudless parts together. With the temporal resolution of 16 days the whole surface of the Earth is photographed every two and a half weeks. The company solved this issue with so-called mosaicking, the same technology that is today used to achieve global cloudless images coverage. As there was no good alternative with global satellite coverage, Google was forced to come up with a means of removing those gaps. In 2003 the craft experienced a hardware failure that resulted in diagonal gaps of missing data. Interestingly Landsat 7 pushed Google to additional remote sensing R&D. The new images are much more detailed and crisp.

Below you can find the comparison of Landsat 7 and 8.

This week Google is updating the images and in most places the change can be clearly visible. Although its spatial and temporal resolutions are similar to the 7th generation, the device has been equipped with a much more precise sensors with 9 spectral bands and Thermal Infrared Sensor. But finally after 14 years it lived to a successor. In 2013 the new Landsat 8 has been deployed to the orbit. It has eight spectral bands with spatial resolutions ranging from 15 to 60 meters and the temporal resolution of 16 days. Landsat 7 launched in 1999 is a different beast. The first Landsat satellite, with an impressive at that time resolution of 80m and 4 spectral bands, had been sent to space back in 1972 and it made possible a huge step forward in the science of remote sensing.

Satellite google maps series#

Have you ever wondered where does the Google Maps and Google Earth satellite images come from? Most of them were taken by Landsat 7. The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S.