Vehicle Vectors and Traffic Patterns from Planet Imagery
This work addresses the problem of large-scale traffic monitoring for urban planning and transportation analysis, though it is incremental in applying known techniques to new satellite data.
The study tackled vehicle detection and motion estimation from Planet satellite imagery, achieving reliable identification of static and moving cars in high-resolution SkySat data and enabling detection in medium-resolution SuperDove imagery using inter-band displacement effects.
We explore methods to detect automobiles in Planet imagery and build a large scale vector field for moving objects. Planet operates two distinct constellations: high-resolution SkySat satellites as well as medium-resolution SuperDove satellites. We show that both static and moving cars can be identified reliably in high-resolution SkySat imagery. We are able to estimate the speed and heading of moving vehicles by leveraging the inter-band displacement (or "rainbow" effect) of moving objects. Identifying cars and trucks in medium-resolution SuperDove imagery is far more difficult, though a similar rainbow effect is observed in these satellites and enables moving vehicles to be detected and vectorized. The frequent revisit of Planet satellites enables the categorization of automobile and truck activity patterns over broad areas of interest and lengthy timeframes.