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philosophygeek | 2 years ago

I wish the press release had a bit more detail about what this model actually does and whether it's actually useful for the suggested use cases.

However, make no mistake: this is for the scientific community and will not help geospatial data to be commercialized. No one cares about your geospatial crop model or that you can identify energy infrastructure or that there's some activity around that copper mine. Well, at least no one cares that will actually pay you.

(FWIW, I cofounded a geospatial analytics company)

Satellite data is extremely idiosyncratic. It's coarse (~10m at best), infrequent (every few days at best), and oh you have to deal with the fact that the planet is covered in 50% clouds at any moment. Satellite data works best on things that don't move, that are fairly large, and change infrequently. If you find a use case that satisfies those conditions and want to make money, then you need to find a problem that terrestrial sensors haven't solved. And if you find that problem, the cost of building, training, and running your model (plus the cost of the data!) has to be less than the marginal value of your model. Good luck finding those use cases.

The US Government is special. We don't know what's going on in North Korea or Ukraine or the South China Sea so we buy high resolution imagery over those areas (30cm) at great cost. Large ag companies and oil companies know what's going on within their own facilities; and price gives them information about the rest of the supply chain.

In other words, this might be an interesting announcement for scientists, but it won't change the geospatial market at all.

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dharmab|2 years ago

PlanetScope is 3.7m and captures the full land area of the earth daily (minus cloud cover, of course): https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/

Disclaimer: I work for Planet.

I also disagree with the assertion "no one will actually pay you." Read pages 26-28 of the quarterly report for more information.

fnands|2 years ago

I work for a customer of Planet and can confirm, we pay Planet a lot of money each year.

bookofjoe|2 years ago

>Satellite data is extremely idiosyncratic. It's coarse (~10m at best)

>The best commercially available spatial resolution for optical imagery is 25 cm, which means that one pixel represents a 25-by-25-cm area on the ground—roughly the size of your laptop.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/commercial-satellite-imagery

RosanaAnaDana|2 years ago

I regularly use up to 3cm aerial imagery.

There are many very nice commercial products available.

fnands|2 years ago

I'm an ML engineer working for a geospatial company and I can assure you, we are looking into this.

> Satellite data is extremely idiosyncratic. It's coarse (~10m at best) 10m is the best free imagery, in the commercial domain it goes down to 30cm.

> Well, at least no one cares that will actually pay you. There are plenty of things people will pay you for. But you gotta find those niches.

> In other words, this might be an interesting announcement for scientists, but it won't change the geospatial market at all.

Maybe, we'll definitely check if it can be fine-tuned on higher res data. We do sometimes use Sentinel-2 (not a lot though), but can help with those cases.

woeirua|2 years ago

I think it is very important for people to understand that terrestrial sensors are orders of magnitude cheaper for most applications, and are typically far more accurate too. There's a reason why most remote sensing companies go out of business fairly quickly.

pmarreck|2 years ago

You have a sibling comment from PlanetScope that claims ~30-50% profit margin, depending on the quarter.

blincoln|2 years ago

> Satellite data is extremely idiosyncratic. It's coarse (~10m at best), infrequent (every few days at best), and oh you have to deal with the fact that the planet is covered in 50% clouds at any moment.

Are the coarseness and cloud aspects going to become less of a factor now that there are commercial high-resolution synthetic aperture radar imagery providers? I'm just a hobbyist, but the imagery I've seen is <i>sharp</i>, and it even caught the NRO's attention.[1]

[1] https://spacenews.com/national-reconnaissance-office-signs-a...

RosanaAnaDana|2 years ago

Like... no?

InfSar (InSar, SAR, whatever we're calling it these days) isn't a drop in replacement for anything. Its really neither here nor there when it comes to the utility of other dataset. Infsar is amazing, dgmw, but its stands on its own and has its own advantages/ disadvantages.

The ocs point stands. Satellite data is tough because there is a shit ton of atmosphere between you and the target. That issue doesn't go away with infsar and especially not if it isnt coincidentally collected with higher resolution spectral data. I've been in the industry for around 15 years. Things have gotten better, but really, its important to understand the context and limitations of specific platforms. Afaik, there is no panacea.

nico|2 years ago

Super interesting. Hadn’t heard of SAR before. Quickly reading about it, it seems like it works like lidar, what’s the difference between the two techniques? Is SAR like “lidar for space”?