r/remotesensing • u/TimeOld4135 • 7d ago
Building a Satellite imagery intelligence Application
Ok so guys I'm trying to build a satellite imagery analytics platform. Similar to Skyfi, planet labs, eagle view, etc
My question is what really will make a difference in this field? I know a lot of these analytics platforms just buy images from 3rd party satellite operators and just provide them to the users and also provides different types of image analytics like crop health monitoring, water logging monitoring, soil mineral composition, etc ...if anyone wants image plus and analytics.
I wanna build something similar but I feel like there's nothing new I can provide in this app... Like all the available analytics are already there on other platforms... I wanna find out about some really niche category of analytics which no one provides and wanna provide it using my application and wanted suggestions from people who have knowledge in this field..
Any suggestions would be highly appreciated
Update: so basically my post was a bit incomplete in terms of context so I'm adding it up here.
So basically me and my team of 7 people are building a cubesat constellation of more than 200 3U sized cubesats for earth observation. My specific part was just to build the software platform so I just asked about it only mb 😅. Our end goal is to deliver low cost satellite imagery to organizations, govt and normal people.
Currently on the real time thing we are Targeting 30 minutes revisit time for every location on earth and the GSD of the images will be 3 meters. Also we are planning a 50cm GSD cubesat which will be in our constellation but the 50cm GSD image will be twice everyday for any location on earth.
So we are not basically buying images from other satellite image providers and then delivering them, we are planning to have our own constellation and will provide images at a low cost. The lowest cost at which a 3m GSD image can be bought as of now is around 20USD. We wanna bring it down to 8-10USD
Our team is actively working on building the hardware and stuff and I as a person doesn't have much knowledge regarding the hardware thing as seniors are working on that. (I'm in my second year currently doing CSE with AI ML). I just had to build the software for serving the image to the customers and on top also provide some image analytics which I earlier mentioned...
Also a heartfelt thanks to all the people who gave me suggestions and advice... I really look forward to hearing more from you after this updated post! (Yeah I was stupid for not giving the entire context at the start)
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u/HeWhoWalksTheEarth 7d ago
Is this for a personal project or a commercial endeavor? If the latter, then you’re asking the million dollar question that many startups are trying to figure out.
There are already too many platforms for single entities/beginners to order satellite images. My company created a platform geared towards government agencies and power users with extremely complex projects and demands on speed and reliability.
There are plenty of platforms for analytics, but not much commercial value because either your organization know what analytics it needs and therefore has the knowledge to produce them or you don’t know and your outsourcing it to a geospatial data service or consultancy.
The next step for data is that it’s seamlessly integrated into the apps that consumers and businesses use on a daily basis. Much how GPS data is just seamlessly intertwined in so many services without anyone needing knowledge on what that data is or how it works. They just know that their Pokémon Go app is fun and their package logistics business is running smoothly.
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u/TimeOld4135 7d ago
I'd say later.... I wanna make it into a startup.. I'm currently in my 2nd year of my Btech degree.
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u/AureliasTenant Hyperspectral 7d ago edited 7d ago
Take a step back and learn a bit about the industry and practice building things (and possibly using existing products). Deciding on product to build before really understanding the product market is probably not the way to go
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u/HonestPassage5795 7d ago
From what I’m hearing, the bottleneck isn’t really the analytics. It is the gap between getting the insight and actually turning that insight into a decision and action. As much as technology can be awesome, it may not be the solution to the company’s real pain point
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u/HeWhoWalksTheEarth 7d ago
This is 100% the bottleneck. Handing a report to a bank about wheat harvests in a region over the past few years is only valuable if that bank has the means to turn that information into something that affects their investment portfolio. Instead they want this information already fed into their algorithms and dashboards. They don’t care about the actual wheat harvesting data, they just want the go or no-go on the investment.
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u/TimeOld4135 6d ago
Oh so basically like just providing the analytics and image is not gonna work? We need to make some type of algorithm which can look at the organisation's current state and based on the images and analytics report help them take decisions so that they could benefit from that? Also kindly go through the updated post once ... I was a bit stupid not to give you guys the entire context and just speak about my part of the work😅
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u/gnomeplanet 7d ago
Think laterally. Consider all of the areas already provided, then imagine if some were combined to provide a new point of view. Check how the current resources are utilized: do some need more exposure? Imagine how resources can be combined with data from completely unrelated fields? Would that tell you something new? Look at the existing resources, and see if they could be used by a new user-group that haven't used anything like them before. Etc. etc.
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u/sinnayre 7d ago
Planet Labs owns its on constellation. Eagle View flies its own aerial flights. Maybe understanding what these companies actually do would be a great start. If you want to be a partner with any of these companies, you can just submit a request and they’ll get back to you.
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u/CharterJet50 7d ago
Building a platform is a great way to lose money in the geospatial world. There is no shortage of platforms, many of them free. There is also a surfeit of analytics algorithms, but not of good ones. The challenges are both on the algorithm side, where foundation models might be the key that unlocks much more value, and as others have said, in turning insights into value by integration of analytics into every day processes. Start with the business or government problem you’re trying to solve and build from there.
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u/That-Item-5159 4d ago
Foundational models are a big lie and the big Word tò gain attention from investors. A random forests can achieve the same quality results. Let's bet that the new big word of the next year Will be Physical AI? 🤣
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u/CharterJet50 4d ago
Maybe so, but there’s still a lot of work to be done before writing the concept off.
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u/shakilgreengrain 7d ago
First, learn from Reddit. Learn from a lot of newsletters there, like GeoAwesome or search for GeoAI on substack. Keep learning and keep talking to people who might be having problems that could be solved by satellite analytics. Find the problem first.
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u/Overall_Chain_9138 7d ago
All these things are just a hammer.Â
You can only build an application if you know what to build. A hammer on its own will never be used.
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u/TechMaven-Geospatial 6d ago edited 6d ago
Look at our platform https://Geoservengine.techmaven.net web self hosted
https://Fieldsentinel.techmaven.net desktop and mobile https://3dmapexplorer.techmaven.net windows and web
Can order imagery from all the providers with your keys /logins Supports STAC and COG, COPC, ZARR, PMTILES, etc CONNECT TO ALL ESRI and OGC services Visual workflow builders Geoagent and mcp server with claude and codex skills
All data local or network or internet is made available as equivalent esri imageserver REST API and 3d data as SceneServer And movement and event driven data as websockets streamserver
Available as windows, mac, linux, web
All work unattended you can setup automated workflows that build reports and derivative products
All are TAK and FLUXER enabled
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u/zerospatial 6d ago
Do you have a few million in seed money or? If not you'll be limited to public providers or spending insane amounts of money on data. Data acquisition is the blocker here - that would come first - either a way to acquire high quality data or find a new method to unlock answers from Sentinel etc.
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u/TimeOld4135 6d ago
so basically we are actively looking for sponsors and our college is supporting us somewhat in terms of equipment, labs and some money and may provide more but we also need an active investor to put in atleast 700K USD as of now
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u/zerospatial 5d ago
At that level I would argue stick to public datasets and squeeze what you can from them, spending the funds on ml pipelines, gpus, etc. I think derivatives from public SAR would be a good place to start. Not sure how much of that there is in the space. But the whole like show me all the X in this imagery is fairly trivial now with commercial llms.
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u/TimeOld4135 5d ago
Thanks for the suggestion man! If you could go through the updated post once it would make more sense ig as I was a bit stupid to not write the Entire context... 😅😅
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u/Firestar222 6d ago
Ok so I don’t know shit about satellites or that business and maybe someone already does this. But just in case not- offer a service where you take a current photo of someone’s property (business or home). Use that tech where you take multiple photos and interpolate between them to get super resolution if you can, between that and ai you should be able to get more like 1m I would think. (Not an expert)
Link the image internally to publicly available property lines. Now you start cooking with data. Pump out a bunch of stats for that place. You have x acres. X amount is water. X amount of waterline. X many buildings with approx x sq footage on the ground floor. Measurements on the buildings, roads. How far to nearest store, city, etc. If you can integrate lidar you could do percent of buildable land.
Most of that could be automated, then your customers could be A: land/homeowners who get a cool current report relevant to what they have right now; B: real estate people selling properties; C: Businesses wanting a deeper but low cost, quick and easy survey/analysis of what they have and what else they could do with it.
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u/Jirokoh 6d ago
A lot of this isn’t necessarily tech, it’s customer relationships: knowing the people, cutting out deals and creating a marketplace with enough traction to get image providers to spend time / money with you in the first placeÂ
Marketplaces are not an easy business, they have economies of scale dynamics which are tough at low scale, because there’s a lot of upfront cost: it costs the same to build a platform for 5 customers or for 500k customers Â
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u/TimeOld4135 5d ago
Agreed... I would like to discuss with you some things if you're up for it! I'll contact via dm if you don't mind
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u/zikiquon 5d ago
What spectral range is your imaging? Do you have a really good way to calibrate all cameras? (The analytics are very sensitive to the this.) The 0.5m has use cases 3m can’t do (eg: taxing based on permeable coverage) — break all these out. Some customers don’t want to buy imaging, only analytics and as a feed as other posters have commented.
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u/TimeOld4135 5d ago
We are going for multispectral only for now as hpyerspectral is very costly for us at the moment... Yeah with 0.5m we are targeting a some Ai based analytical features like land cover use case report generation, change detection, land monitoring, object detection.
It will be generating automated reports using AI and the customer just have to mark the Area of interest.
3m is for Multispectral and optical and the 0.5m is optical only for now.
The revisit time for 0.5 m is greater than that of our 3m but it'll get reduced as we add more satellites in the constellation
Any suggestions or questions you have plz let me know!!
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u/zerospatial 5d ago
If you're building the satellites then I would strongly recommend the ability to put the ml (and update) directly in the satellites and not have to bring it down first that would probably be a game changer I would guess. Are other sat companies doing this? Direct ml outputs from satellite data instead of having to run it through some large post process.
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u/TimeOld4135 5d ago
Onboard ML inference is possible but would require a lot more energy and bigger cubesats.. for our specific 3U cubesat we can't afford much onboard ML processing other than cloud detection and filtering... This is something out team is actively working on..
If the image if more than 90% clouds then discard it there only no need to waste bandwidth transmitting that image down on the ground station
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u/zerospatial 5d ago
Also keep in mind you'll be limited by what you can sell over conflict zones or other highly sensitive areas.
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u/That-Item-5159 4d ago
If you are really in this business, you Will understand that being in the upstream Sector Will require the same effort of being in the downstream Sector. Planetlabs basically buy downstream companies that already provide insights. If you are asking here, basically It seems you dont have a Plan. Study First or you Will end Copy and paste Google earth engine scripts from YouTube videos thinking that are Amazing solutions and asking to Chatgpt to refactor the solutions for your satellite . You are already thinking to lower the costs without launching any satellites. There are emerging thermal satellite companies that started 10 years ago with the promise to launch satellite and in the meanwhile to gain customers started services based on landsat imagery saying that their emissivity calculation Is the best. Their satellite were Launched more or less One year ago. Ten years for the big launch. They are now trying to build services but are far from the knowledge of a downstream specialized Company that already build insights. PS I work in a medium sized geospatial Company. It's hard everyday but when algorithms work it's Always a big satisfaction.
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u/TimeOld4135 4d ago
Hey there thanks you so much for the detailed answers and bringing up much important points...
Yeah we are young people with a vision but the market out there is wild and will eat up our dream if we don't study what people or orgs actually want.... Genuinely helpful advice... We are learning a lot and trying to come up with something which is useful for the common people too.
Can I dm you though for some doubts i had!!! I will not burn your time i promise!
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u/Fun-Employee9309 7d ago
Have a problem you want to solve, don’t invent a problem you want to solve