Commercial Sources of Aerial/Satellite Imagery

Vendors of imagery often appear and change; this is just a moving snapshot of some of the more prominent firms including data providers and resellers.  Listed alphabetically:

• AirPhotoUSA
  • the dominant provider of color aerial imagery of US cities
  • their online map browser allows downloading of small specific areas starting at $35/image
• DigitalGlobe
  • operates the QuickBird satellite: typical resolution 0.61 meters panchromatic, 2.44 meters truecolor
  • they don't sell imagery directly, but through a set of resellers (GlobeXplorer, etc.)
  • a lot of the best high-resolution images have been licensed by Google for exclusive (!) use in Google Earth / Google Maps, which means nobody else can use them at full resolution
  • their CitySphere product has orthorectified 60 cm color imagery of 200 of the largest cities worldwide
• E-Spatial (Litton / Emerge)
  • produces and sells aerial photos, 2ft-3ft GSD Typical
  • aerial are orthorectified to DEM (30m DEM typical, or customer supplied)
• EarthSat
  • sells a seamless global, true color 15m LandSat mosaic, GeoCover NaturalVue 2000
  • by doing color-correction and pan-merge with an giant set of LandSat images from the year 2000, they have the highest resolution complete globe available anywhere
  • pricing is very reasonable, ranging from $50 (for a single 5x6 degree tile) to $20,000 for the whole dataset (single user, more for publishing or broadcasting)
  • Quality issues: some areas are wonderful, others have strange colors.  It is not cloud-free, nor consistently true-color.  See thumbnails to the right, of Pearl Harbor and northern Albania.
• EarthWatch
  • provides both elevation and image data, including ortho-corrected imagery
  • mostly "panchromatic" (greyscale), some spread-spectrum images
  • they deal through their local distributors
• GeoEye, formed in 2006 from the combination of:
  • Space Imaging Inc.
    • based in Thornton, CO, founded in 1994, formed by Lockheed
    • sell imagery from their IKONOS satellite with 1-meter B&W and 4-meter color resolution with high positional accuracy
    • also has a partnership with ANTRIX Corp. Ltd. of India, exclusive rights to Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellite imagery (5m panchromatic, 25-200m multispectral)
  • ORBIMAGE Inc.
    • operates a series of satellites called ORBVIEW
    • one-meter panchromatic and four-meter multispectral imagery from their OrbView-3 satellite
• Getmapping PLC / Bluesky Intl. Ltd.
  • Getmapping is a UK company which sells a great deal of UK aerial imagery, although they have many international assets, including the USA
  • Bluesky is a supplier of aerial photography both as Getmapping's master reseller and as a company in its own right
• GlobeXplorer
  • provides a limited but easy to use online browsing tool to find and order imagery from many sources, including AirPhotoUSA, EarthSat, DigitalGlobe, i-cubed, Space Imaging and many others
  • however, it is strongly oriented toward novice users who simply want a printed image
• i-cubed
  • they used to have a Millennium Mosaic™ which covered the entire USA at 15m color, from LandSat7 pan-merge, but this appears to have vanished from their site
  • they still sell/resell a whole range of Aerial and Satellite imagery
• LAND INFO Satellite
  • in addition to being a general reseller of all sorts of geodata, LAND INFO resells imagery from the QuickBird, Ikonos, IRS satellite and more
• Landsat4U
  • very cheap distribution of LandSat 4,5 images ($20/scene) for the south-western USA, including the SF Bay Area
  • they provide all 7 'raw' color bands, not processed to truecolor, not georeferenced
• MapMart
  • a major portal with many partners, offering a large amount of Aerial Photography with direct online searching, purchasing and download
  • their USA coverage does not include Alaska or Hawai'i; some of their pricing seems a little odd, particularly $50/quad to download public-domain USGS DOQQ files..
• Satellite Imaging Corporation (SIC)
  • Resells and does services on data from QuickBird, IKONOS and SPOT.
• SPOT Image Corp.
  • original satellite data producer, typically $1500-6000 per image
  • only image types: panchromatic and multi-spectral (3 bands: Red, Green, Near-Infrared)
  • the color bands are typically quite crude, eg. 4-5 bits for Red, 3-5 bits for Green
  • SPOT's data is generally resold by other agencies
• STI Services
  • distributor of imagery from most commercial satellites (EarthWatch, RadarSat, Space Imaging/EOSAT, SPOT), based in Honolulu
• TerraServer.com (commercial)
  • a joint project started by Microsoft Research, Aerial Images Inc., HP, Kodak and Sovinformsputnik
  • hosts USGS DOQ, SPIN-2 Russian satellite imagery, and other image data sources
  • low-resolution images can be downloaded for free, with full resolution available on a subscription basis (up to $100 per year)
  • current site is extremely slow, showing blurry, grainy monochrome images, with very small areas of coverage
  • a non-commercial branch ( http://terraservice.net/ ) exists with only US (USGS) coverage