Process existing free remote sensing
data with MapTiler
Different satellites carry different sensors and therefore they vary in provided services. The well known value is a spatial resolution, which refers to the size of one pixel on the ground. It can be increased by pansharpening, a technique of merging high-resolution panchromatic (grayscale) with low-resolution colored images. But satellites with high-resolution cameras covers just small areas and therefore they have long revisit time, which is a crucial aspect for some types of analysis. Some projects require data in other spectral bands, such as infrared for NDVI application for agriculture. The data also vary in level of processing: from raw sensor data to calibrated images with correct location information. MapTiler helps to turn an image into final zoomable map.
Free data, mostly from NASA and ESA, can be found in specialized catalogs, where users search based on the area of interest, required resolution, or capture date. The most popular satellites with free data in visible spectrum are Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2. They can be found in the USGS Earth Explorer catalog.
While browsing is without restrictions for anyone, downloading requires to be logged in. After filling in very detailed form, you will get an access to high number of scientific data from satellites.
In the Search criteria, define your area of interest either by looking up for an address or by defining a polygon. This can be done simply by clicking on the map or by uploading an shapefile or KML file. You can also restrict your search by date. In Data Sets tab, you can select required satellites. In your case, Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 are the correct option. In Additional criteria, you can impose extra limitations like cloud coverage. Finally, Results shows you founded images and you can switch between results from selected satellites. Each result has a preview and for logged users also download option.
Those who want to used already prepared tiles can use OpenMapTiles project, which provides a download for satellite imagery of the whole world. Users who want to build satellite imagery into their websites can use Cloud for MapTiler.
By drag and drop images into MapTiler, setting few parameters and rendering you can get output in form of online map. This can be uploaded to cloud services like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud, but also to your own servers or integrated into your application.
Windows | Mac | Linux
Processing of large volumes of data can be parallelized on multiple computers using MapTiler Cluster to significantly decrease the rendering time.
