As Planet collects in excess of 200-million km2 of imagery every day, the company deems it important to help its customers sift out the best pixels for their applications from this massive dataset. This latest feature, Usable Data Masks, addresses two things: enhancing data discovery, and reliably increasing the fraction of pixels that are able to be consumed by a broad range of customers and applications. Previously, the company only provided information about which pixels within a scene were unusable in a binary yes/no fashion. While this helps filter out bad pixels, it provided little insight about how useful the remaining pixels are. The new Usable Data Masks leverage machine learning image segmentation techniques to identify which pixels in the image are clear or cloudy, or are contaminated by light or heavy haze, or snow. The resulting image mask layers, packaged as a GeoTIFF, helps visualise what parts of the image contain these elements and what parts are clear. The company also added six new metadata categories to search within the Planet API for images that meet their needs.
Contact Nuno Vilaça, Planet, nuno@planet.com
