If you have noticed a significant jump in the resolution, sharpness, and overall consistency of your mosaics, it is due to a series of major production upgrades rolled out over the course of 2022. These changes were heavily driven by the transition to our newer satellite generations and advanced processing pipelines.

The SuperDove Transition and Visual Sharpening

A primary driver for the improved quality was shifting our baseline data source. We officially transitioned mosaic production from Dove-Classic to SuperDove-only data, coinciding with the end of Dove-Classic imaging. This shift created a much higher level of consistency between individual visual scenes and final mosaics.

In addition to better source imagery, we introduced a new visual sharpening method starting with the April 2022 global visual mosaic. This update brought the overall image quality of our visual mosaic directly in line with PS Ortho Visual Scenes.

Industry-Standard Band Alignment

To provide highly accurate data for time-series analysis and machine learning, we pushed major upgrades to band alignment throughout the year:

• February 2022: A major alignment update for all SuperDoves achieved a band alignment, matching the target industry standard and providing vastly superior input data for mosaic generation.

• July 2022: We committed to reprocessing the entire SuperDove and Dove-R archive to ensure consistent band alignment across historical data and eliminate the need to maintain split processing pipelines.

• Late 2022: Another deployment in November substantially upgraded global band alignment—specifically over tricky water and coastal areas. By December, we successfully hit our engineering milestones.

Expanded Product Offerings: 8-Band Mosaics

Alongside visual enhancements, April 2022 marked the launch of 8-band mosaics for any historical time period stretching back to August 2020. This allowed us to align our mosaic product options directly with the PlanetScope Scene (PSScene) 8-band General Availability release.

To preserve radiometric consistency for ongoing projects and manage a 2x increase in data size, existing Surface Reflectance (SR) mosaic users were not automatically migrated to the 8-band format.

Global Mosaics Regeneration

To tie all of these individual upgrades together, we initiated plans to regenerate our global visual monthly and quarterly mosaics (excluding NICFI). By reapplying both the advanced band alignment and the new visual sharpening across the archive, we ensured a flawless, visually consistent experience when users look at data changing through time.

The result can be clearly seen in the following screenshots.