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:

SuperVision Earth – An automatic cloud-based system, which can quickly and accurately detect risks to gas pipelines. The system processes the latest Copernicus data from the location of the pipeline and compares it with past data and images. When a risk is detected, a higher resolution image is downloaded from PlanetScope to increase the detection accuracy, before informing the pipeline operator.

Village Data Analytics – Universal access to energy (SDG 7) is one of the world’s great challenges. At least 1 billion people are still living without electricity. The established process to find and characterize villages for electrification is slow and inaccurate. Village Data Analytics (VIDA) addresses that. It is a software that uses Copernicus data to characterize villages in a user-defined area. The most promising villages are then surveyed on-ground and the results are cross-checked using Planet’s imagery and AI algorithms to determine factors such as historic village growth and building characteristics. This enables rapid, data-driven decision making for governments, donors and private sector companies.

Green City Watch – The world’s first geoAI platform for nature in cities. Using Sentinel-2’s Multi-Spectral Instrument to classify land-use, Planet’s medium-resolution, daily imagery to track changes, and Planet’s high-resolution SkySat imagery to detect individual tree removals, their award-winning ‘Green City Watch Index’ scores high for the ecological, social, and economic quality of urban green space. Green City Watch offers the first industry standard for at-scale, globally-applicable, standardized green and blue space assessments. Their mission is to revolutionize the way we value nature, bring transparency to local government, and regenerate our cities.

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

The winner of the Planet Daily Change Challenge will be announced on-stage during the awards ceremony at the European Space Week in December in Helsinki, Finland. 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.