What is Satellite Image Analysis?
Satellite Image Analysis is the application of AI and computer vision to process and interpret earth observation imagery from satellites and aerial platforms. It enables businesses and governments to monitor environmental changes, assess agricultural conditions, plan urban development, manage supply chains, and make data-driven decisions about physical assets and natural resources across large geographic areas.
What is Satellite Image Analysis?
Satellite Image Analysis uses computer vision and machine learning to extract meaningful information from images captured by satellites, drones, and other aerial platforms. These images can cover everything from individual buildings to entire countries, and modern AI systems can automatically identify objects, detect changes, classify land use, and measure environmental conditions across these vast areas.
While humans can only visually analyse a small number of images at a time, AI systems can process thousands of satellite images daily, tracking changes over time and detecting patterns that would be impossible to identify manually at scale.
How Satellite Image Analysis Works
The technology combines several computer vision techniques:
- Image classification: Categorising each pixel or region as a specific land type such as forest, farmland, urban area, or water body
- Object detection: Identifying specific structures like buildings, vehicles, ships, solar panels, or industrial facilities
- Change detection: Comparing images of the same area taken at different times to identify what has changed, such as new construction, deforestation, or flood damage
- Spectral analysis: Using multiple wavelength bands beyond visible light, including infrared and radar, to assess vegetation health, moisture levels, and soil conditions
Data Sources
- Commercial satellite providers: Planet, Maxar, and Airbus provide high-resolution imagery with daily to weekly revisit rates
- Government programmes: Copernicus (Sentinel satellites) and Landsat provide free moderate-resolution imagery covering the entire planet
- Drone imagery: For higher resolution analysis of specific areas, businesses supplement satellite data with drone flights
Business Applications of Satellite Image Analysis
Agriculture and Food Security
Agricultural companies and government agencies use satellite analysis to monitor crop health, predict yields, detect pest and disease outbreaks, and assess water stress across large farming regions. In Southeast Asia, this supports everything from palm oil plantation management to rice paddy monitoring.
Environmental Monitoring and Compliance
Companies use satellite analysis to monitor deforestation, track emissions from industrial sites, assess water quality in rivers and coastal areas, and demonstrate environmental compliance to regulators and investors. ESG reporting increasingly requires verifiable data that satellite monitoring can provide.
Urban Planning and Development
City planners track urban expansion, monitor construction activity, assess infrastructure conditions, and plan development using satellite-derived land use maps. This is critical for rapidly growing Southeast Asian cities.
Insurance and Risk Assessment
Insurers use satellite imagery to assess property conditions, evaluate natural disaster damage at scale, and model climate-related risks. After typhoons or floods, satellite analysis can assess damage across affected areas within hours rather than the weeks required for ground surveys.
Supply Chain Monitoring
Commodity traders and manufacturers monitor supply chain activities through satellite imagery, tracking shipping activity at ports, storage levels at facilities, and agricultural conditions that affect raw material availability.
Financial Intelligence
Investment firms use satellite data to track retail foot traffic, construction activity, oil storage levels, and other economic indicators that provide insights ahead of traditional data sources.
Satellite Image Analysis in Southeast Asia
The technology is particularly valuable in the region:
- Deforestation monitoring: Indonesia and Malaysia face international scrutiny over palm oil-related deforestation. Satellite analysis provides transparent, verifiable monitoring that supports sustainable sourcing commitments and certification requirements
- Disaster response: The region's vulnerability to typhoons, floods, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes creates strong demand for rapid damage assessment capabilities that satellite analysis provides
- Agricultural optimisation: Rice production across Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar benefits from satellite-based crop monitoring that helps farmers optimise planting schedules, irrigation, and harvest timing
- Maritime monitoring: With extensive coastlines and busy shipping lanes, ASEAN nations use satellite analysis to monitor fishing activity, detect illegal fishing, track maritime traffic, and respond to oil spills
- Urban infrastructure planning: Rapid urbanisation in cities like Jakarta, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City creates demand for satellite-derived data to support infrastructure investment and planning decisions
Data Availability and Cost
Satellite imagery has become increasingly accessible and affordable:
- Free data: Sentinel and Landsat imagery covering the entire planet is freely available for commercial use, with resolutions of 10 to 30 metres
- Commercial high-resolution: Imagery at 30 to 50 centimetre resolution costs USD 5 to 25 per square kilometre. Subscription models from providers like Planet offer daily global coverage at competitive rates
- Analysis platforms: Google Earth Engine, Microsoft Planetary Computer, and AWS Earth provide cloud-based platforms for processing satellite data at scale
Getting Started with Satellite Image Analysis
- Define the geographic area and frequency of monitoring your business requires
- Assess data needs to determine whether free data provides sufficient resolution or whether commercial imagery is needed
- Start with cloud-based platforms that provide both data access and analysis tools, avoiding the need to build infrastructure from scratch
- Partner with experienced providers for initial projects, building internal capability as you learn what insights deliver the most business value
- Integrate satellite insights with your existing data to combine geographic intelligence with operational and financial information
Satellite image analysis provides businesses with a unique capability: monitoring physical assets, natural resources, and economic activity across large geographic areas at regular intervals without sending anyone into the field. For executives in Southeast Asia, this translates to better-informed decisions about agriculture, real estate, supply chains, and environmental compliance at a fraction of the cost of traditional ground-based monitoring.
The strategic value is amplified by the region's geographic characteristics. Southeast Asia spans thousands of islands, vast agricultural areas, and rapidly expanding urban centres that are difficult and expensive to monitor through traditional means. Satellite analysis makes it economically feasible to track environmental conditions across Indonesian palm oil plantations, monitor construction activity across multiple Philippine cities, or assess flood damage across Thai provinces, all within hours of image acquisition.
For businesses involved in commodities, real estate, insurance, or any industry with significant physical assets, satellite image analysis is increasingly becoming a competitive necessity rather than an innovation luxury. Companies that integrate satellite intelligence into their decision-making gain information advantages that translate directly into better timing, reduced risk, and more efficient resource allocation.
- Start with freely available satellite data from Sentinel or Landsat before investing in expensive commercial imagery. Free data at 10-metre resolution is sufficient for many monitoring applications.
- Cloud cover is a significant challenge in tropical Southeast Asia. Build your monitoring approach to account for frequent cloud obscuration, potentially supplementing optical imagery with radar data from Sentinel-1.
- Processing satellite imagery at scale requires cloud computing resources. Use platforms like Google Earth Engine or AWS that handle the infrastructure, rather than attempting to build your own processing pipeline.
- Define clear business questions before collecting imagery. The most common failure mode is gathering vast amounts of satellite data without a clear analytical framework for converting it into actionable business insights.
- Consider data update frequency carefully. Some applications need daily monitoring while others need only monthly or seasonal updates. More frequent monitoring increases costs significantly.
- Combine satellite insights with ground-truth data. Satellite analysis identifies areas of interest, but ground verification is often needed to confirm findings and calibrate models.
Frequently Asked Questions
How detailed are satellite images and can they show individual objects?
Resolution varies by source. Free satellite imagery from Sentinel provides 10-metre resolution, meaning each pixel represents a 10-by-10 metre area on the ground. This is sufficient for monitoring land use, vegetation health, and urban expansion but cannot identify individual vehicles or people. Commercial high-resolution satellites from Maxar and Airbus provide 30 to 50 centimetre resolution, which can identify individual vehicles, assess building conditions, and count shipping containers. For detailed inspection of specific sites, drone imagery provides centimetre-level resolution but covers much smaller areas.
How quickly can satellite imagery be analysed after an event like a natural disaster?
Modern satellite analysis can provide initial damage assessments within 6 to 24 hours after image acquisition, depending on cloud cover and satellite tasking schedules. For major disasters, satellite operators prioritise acquiring imagery of affected areas. AI analysis of the acquired images can be completed in minutes to hours. The main bottleneck is typically image acquisition rather than analysis, as satellites need to pass over the affected area during daylight hours with acceptable cloud cover. Emergency response organisations like the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters coordinate rapid satellite tasking for disaster events.
More Questions
For applications that can use free Sentinel or Landsat data with cloud-based analysis platforms, ongoing costs can be as low as USD 500 to 2,000 per month for computing resources. Commercial high-resolution imagery for monitoring specific areas typically costs USD 5 to 25 per square kilometre per acquisition. A complete satellite monitoring solution for a business, including imagery, analysis, and dashboards, typically ranges from USD 2,000 to 20,000 per month depending on coverage area, update frequency, and analysis complexity. Many providers offer annual subscriptions that reduce per-unit costs significantly.
Need help implementing Satellite Image Analysis?
Pertama Partners helps businesses across Southeast Asia adopt AI strategically. Let's discuss how satellite image analysis fits into your AI roadmap.