From the time when digital maps was not mainstream and around 1918 when the WWII had employed pigeons to capture the aerial pictures, the evolution of gathering aerial photos of the earth has gone many technical advancements. So we must believe there would be major uses of the earth imagery and hence we would explore why it is important for enterprises. Additionally, why and what those technical advancements are and take a dive deep for enterprise users to help make a decision.

1. Imagery for
enterprise maps
Earth Imagery - Basics Part 1

2. Concept
From the time when digital maps was not mainstream and around 1918 when the WWII had
employed pigeons to capture the aerial pictures, the evolution of gathering aerial photos of
the earth has gone many technical advancements.
So we must believe there would be major uses of the earth imagery and hence we would
explore why it is important for enterprises. Additionally, why and what those technical
advancements are and take a dive deep for enterprise users to help make a decision.

3. Why Imagery and not just vector data
1. Redfin, Zillow's - Real estate Case
2. LinkedIn and professional network
3. CalFire, FEMA and other community, state and government organizations
4. Entertainment map

4. What does it take
Any Imagery provider like DigitalGlobe and Vricon and Planet or small players they all have to
go thru multiple combinations of following to market appetizing imagery products.
1. Investment
2. Research
3. Hardware
4. Software
5. Manned or unmanned aerial vehicle or satellite
6. Computer Graphics, Computer Vision technology
7. Post-Processing capabilities
8. Identifying and filling the gaps of resolution, the speed of acquisition and cost.

5. Where Enterprises spend ?
1. Imagery acquisition - multiple man hours and experiments to realise the formats,
specifications and experiments with imagery that will work for them.
2. Partnerships - Most of the high res imagery is not open API or Open Data until recently.
3. Vendor and partner management to get it deployed on premise or in cloud.
4. In house processing - automated or not.
5. Ingestion into platform of choice.

6. Advancements in Earth Imagery tech

7. Gaps and what’s next
1. Cloud Store availability of imagery on popular cloud platform - at least for the free
ones.
2. More integration and penetration into the developer community- making scalable and
intuitive APIs
3. Mindset change - Imagery is not just for GeoINT and national disaster planning
4. Vectorization, AI and innovative search solutions.
5. API, Scale , Automation and innovating pricing models for other parts of the world.

8. Players
DigitalGlobe and Maps API
Google Earth Imagery
NASA Landsat
NASA MODIS and Terra
Copernicus European program
USDA Imagery Program
Planet
And more...