Planet Names Top Three Finalists of the Planet Daily Change Challenge, part of Copernicus Masters

Following a multi-phase evaluation this past summer, Planet is pleased to announce the top three finalists of the Planet Daily Change Challenge, a challenge of the Copernicus Masters competition that awards prizes to developers who leverage Earth observation data to solve important problems for business and society.

The three finalists and their proposed solutions demonstrate the diverse range of use cases and applications that can be built upon daily global satellite imagery. The top three finalists, in no particular, order are:

Forest Degradation Watch. Forest Degradation Watch detects forest degradation from daily 3 m Planet images, integrating them with a Sentinel-2 processing chain on the cloud. It is the first operational service that will deliver near-real-time forest degradation alerts to app users (forest rangers and plantation owners) and allows feedback from users via the app to a central dashboard.

Spiral Blue Piracy. Spiral Blue is a web service to provide early warning of maritime piracy. It will identify potentially suspicious vessels that are likely to pose a danger to ships passing through the Western Indian Ocean High Risk Area (HRA) by fusing data from Planet daily images, marine forecasts from Copernicus, previous pirate attacks, and ship beacons. It’s possible to see where law abiding ships are right now online, and with the service it’ll be possible to do this for law-breaking ships too.

Forest Health Monitoring. This solution leverages the latest advancements in satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to monitor forest health and threats, like drought, insect plagues, and other forest disturbances. Accurate, timely insights will help forest industry companies and governments to act and protect forests around the world via our intuitive dashboard. This solution uses Planet and Sentinel data. This unique combination provides daily updates, multispectral, hyperspectral images and weather independent SAR to extract complex patterns.

What ties the three finalists and their projects together is that they capitalize on Planet’s frequent global data for creating real-time solutions; they deploy cutting-edge machine learning techniques to make sense of large volumes of data; and they demonstrate both environmental and business use cases that help both people and the planet, which is core to Planet’s mission.

Planet received a wealth of submissions to the Planet Daily Change Challenge, which were evaluated by a panel of multidisciplinary experts. Participants were first evaluated based on their written submissions to the competition, then a selection of the best ideas were invited to pitch their solutions to the panel. The three finalists were selected by Planet during the evaluation meeting in early September.

The winner of the Planet Daily Change Challenge will be announced on-stage during the awards ceremony at the European Space Week on December 4 in Marseille, France. To learn more about Copernicus Masters, visit their website and keep an eye out for the full list of finalists from all challenges coming soon.