Planet’s building detection feed augments Planet basemaps with building locations, updated monthly. This map shows an area of mixed small and large buildings on the outskirts of a Cairo, Egypt. © 2019, Planet Labs Inc. All Rights Reserved.
AUTHOR PROFILE Jenna Mukuno Senior Director of Product and Industry Marketing
Jenna oversees the teams responsible for helping our customers understand how Planet can help solve their challenges with daily Earth data and insights.

Planet Analytic Feeds No Longer in Beta, Achieve Global Scale

News

Today, Planet Analytic Feeds are moving out of beta, and our three flagship Analytic Feeds—Road Detection, Building Detection, and Vessel Detection—can now scale globally and are offered off-the-shelf. This means that customers can leverage these feeds on top of Planet imagery products and get automated road, building, and vessel detections over their areas of interest, with no custom builds required.

Planet’s customers manage large volumes of imagery, but are often interested in tracking specific objects or features. This kind of analysis can be costly, time consuming and labor-intensive when done manually, sometimes leading organizations to use resources inefficiently or expose themselves to risk.

But with Planet Analytic Feeds, machine learning and cloud computing do the heavy lifting. Rather than spending their time manually annotating imagery or building bespoke models—users can select an area to monitor and automatically get detections for vessels on a particular day, or road and building detections for a particular month, all computed in a matter of minutes.

“One of the biggest challenges our users face is becoming overwhelmed by the amount of data collected for analysis,” says Justin Davis, product manager at Planet. “Our Analytic Feeds reduce stresses on customer time and energy to help prioritize resources so customers can make faster, more effective decisions.”

Imagine you’re interested in tracking and locating ships that have their automatic identification system (AIS) signals turned off, and could be carrying illegal cargo. The Vessel Detection Feed can pinpoint ships, revealing when they arrived and departed in a port or off a coastline.

Similarly, if you’re an organization monitoring new infrastructure or construction, you can choose an area you want to survey, then leverage Road Detection and Building Detection to track new developments on a monthly basis.

“The high temporal cadence of Planet Analytic Feeds allows customers to establish baselines of infrastructure and activity, and get an early signal that something has changed, so they can prepare for and mitigate risks,” Davis says.

Every pixel tells a story, it just requires some work to make the story come alive. At Planet, we’re focused on making it easier to find those insights and stories, so our customers have to do less of the heavy lifting.

Be the first to hear about new product releases, including Planet Analytic Feeds, by registering for our first-ever user conference, Planet Explore 2019, on October 15 and 16 in San Francisco.