Maxar Technologies has launched a new Analysis-Ready Data (ARD) subscription service. The service, which will provide Maxar’s industry-leading imagery in “analysis-ready” form, handles the preprocessing steps necessary to make imagery accessible and delivers consistent inputs directly into an AWS compute environment, thus allowing data scientists to jump straight into their image analysis workflows.
The ARD subscription service will provide consistent imagery, thus speeding up the pixel-to-answer workflow and enabling compute vision models to be deployed across geographies. This will help data scientists, analysts and other such imagery users to stop worrying about organizing and preprocessing inputs and instead skip straight to analysis.
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Maxar, which is retiring its GBDX set by January 2022, said it was excited about the accuracy, consistency and time-saving benefits the new service will offer its users looking to accelerate their AI/ML workflows. GBDX, or the Geospatial Big Data platform from Maxar, provides online access to large quantities of spatial data, which includes the Maxar data content library with its satellite imagery. GBDX leverages AWS platform to deliver scalable storage and compute resources that can be used for advanced geospatial analytics and AI machine learning applications.
Time series analysis
The ARD service is also optimized for the analysis of imagery over time. Users can set a date range or desired stack depth and automatically align each imagery acquisition to the others within the stack. The deep stacks create combined signals, which help identify noise and increase confidence in feature extraction, object detection, training data generation and other common artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) workflows.
Each ARD order delivers pansharpened RGB, multispectral and panchromatic satellite imagery tiles tailored to the user’s area of interest (AOI) and time frame as Cloud-optimized geotiffs. The order can also be a standalone single image, on which an analyst can use AI/ML algorithm.
Each order also includes extensive data masks, showing where an algorithm may fail due to imagery obstructed by atmospheric conditions such as clouds.
The service provides customers an API for on-demand access for searching the company’s 20-year exhaustive high-resolution imagery library, and then select and order in the ARD format. Maxar’s software development kit can also be integrated with existing code, enabling collocated workflows. The selection and ordering is all done on AWS environment, making it faster and eliminating the need to port data from different systems.
