In March’s Agile EO episode, we introduced Aircraft Detection—a new offering that provides near-daily monitoring of thousands of airfields globally, enabling trends and anomalies to be spotted. Watch the webinar on-demand.
Below are common questions, and questions that we weren’t able to get to during the live event. Our hosts Justin Davis, Sr. Product Manager - Applied Machine Learning, and Adam Van Etten, Principal Data Scientist, have provided answers, plus resources to learn more.
Questions
Question: Can you track aircraft in flight?
Answer: We can’t say for sure that a given aircraft is the same aircraft from one day to the next, BUT we can track how many aircraft are present at a given airfield each day AND whether the aircraft present are in the same positions as they were before. This can help indicate activity at a given airport/airfield and highlight anomalous behavior.
Question: How big of an airplane can you detect?
Answer: In our experimentation, we found performance for aircraft under 25 m in length weren’t reliable enough to include, so we have a cutoff at 25 m.
Question: How do I get access to the dashboard you showed?
Answer: Adam’s dashboard is a proof of concept showing what is possible with Planet Aircraft Detection results. At this stage, it’s not hosted for public use, but please reach out to your customer rep or Justin (justin@planet.com) to learn how to create a similar one for your use.
Question: Do you categorize the aircraft, i.e fighter, bomber, tanker, civilian or military?
Answer: In PlanetScope, we have been sticking with a single aircraft class, however the context of where the aircraft is (e.g. a military airfield vs. a commercial airport) and how large it is can frequently indicate additional downstream classifications.
Question: Can you detect aircraft motion with time difference between 2 bands? It's been done that way with WV and Sentinel 2. In Sentinel 2 they use 2 second difference between two IR bands.
Answer: While our off-the-shelf Aircraft Detection model is only aimed at detecting stationary aircraft on the ground, we have developed an unreleased model that detects vehicles in motion in Planetscope using the same phenomenon; details are here. If this is of interest, please reach out to Justin (justin@planet.com).
Question: How is this new feature going to be included in the current Planet licensing system?
Answer: Planet’s Aircraft Detection is available for purchase bundled along with the PlanetScope imagery that’s analyzed. For more information please contact sales or Justin (justin@planet.com).
Question: Are there areas where there’s trouble tracking aircraft?
Answer: An evergreen answer for any object we’re trying to detect is “clouds.” Any area that has consistent cloud coverage means we’ll have less opportunities to get a clear image and generally more difficulty getting enough signal to drive value.
Question: Where can I learn about other change detection capabilities from Planet?
Answer: Check out our webinar on Road & Building Change Detection here.
Resources
- Watch the recording on-demand
- Contact sales to get started with Aircraft Detection
- Dive deeper in our related blog post, Aircraft Detection at Planetary Scale
- Explore Planet Analytic Feeds
