What are these vertical or horizontal lines running through my imagery? What is a tap sensor?

You may find when observing a large area of imagery that both vertical and horizontal lines may be present.

Not all images will present both vertical and horizontal images and they can be subtle depending on the analysis on the images.

The lines become slightly more obvious when calculating a spectral index like Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) or Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI).

The lines result from the process of capturing remotely sensed images and they do not impact product quality.

Please see the following example with both vertical and horizontal lines:

Screenshot_20250428_102453.png

So what are the vertical and horizontal lines?

The vertical lines are known as tap boundaries. Tap boundaries occurs within the satellites sensor frame. The sensor is made up of several different strips that read out independently. Each of those strips is a called a tap

 

The horizontal lines are new frames, i.e. where a new scene starts and ends.

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