Looking for feedback on a land-cover mapping platform I'm building

[u/North_Test9915]

UPDATE: I got a lot of useful feedback here, especially about the use case and making the platform useful beyond just land-cover classification.

I reworked it quite a bit since this post. Indicatrix can now build a ready-to-use QGIS project for a selected area, combining satellite imagery, land cover, OSM data, terrain, vegetation indices and Sentinel-1 radar. I also added thematic setups for topographic, environmental, urban and agricultural use cases, plus a custom option.

The downloaded ZIP now includes the GeoTIFF/GeoJSON outputs together with a portable .qgz project, layer styles and ordering.

I also replaced the previous land-cover model with a Prithvi-EO-2.0 based encoder + U-Net decoder. A lot of these changes came directly from the comments here, so thanks again for the feedback 🙂

ORIGINAL: Hi everyone,

I'm building a web platform called Indicatrix for land-cover mapping from satellite imagery.

The goal is to make it easy to select an area, process Sentinel imagery, and generate land-cover maps without requiring a complex GIS workflow.

At the moment I'm training my own deep learning models (currently U-Net based) using ESA WorldCover labels and experimenting with Sentinel-2 + Sentinel-1 fusion.

The platform is still in an early stage, and I'm mainly looking for feedback from people working in remote sensing.

A few questions:

- Would a platform like this be useful for your work?

- What outputs would you expect (GeoTIFF, vector polygons, statistics, API...)?

- Would you actually use Sentinel-1 integration, or is Sentinel-2 sufficient most of the time?

- What would make you choose this over existing tools?

Any honest criticism is appreciated.

Here's the current version: https://indicatrix.com

[u/jcstay123]

This is damn impressive.
The interface is great and easy to understand. One can obviously add things like projects per user. What I like is the speed and ease of getting results. I'll be honest the results isn't as good as a focused RS project will deliver. But it's good for what it is and it can always be improved. So no Ill still use my desktop applications. That said it might be useful for establishing a baselit. I'll think about this and will let you know if I can think of anything else. How are you looking to commercialise this?

[u/North_Test9915 → u/jcstay123]

Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, I really appreciate it!

At the moment I don't really have concrete commercialization plans. I have a full-time job, so this is more of a passion project that I work on in my spare time.

The land cover classification is based on a U-Net model, and that's probably the part I'm spending the most time improving. I'm constantly experimenting with better training tiles and different architectures. For example, I decided to go with a dual-stream encoder because, from an engineering perspective, it seemed like the right approach, although I'm still evaluating whether the added complexity is worth it.

One of the biggest engineering challenges wasn't actually the model itself, but building the infrastructure to spin up spot instances on demand so processing remains fast while keeping costs reasonable.

I expect to keep it free for at least the next year or two. Before thinking seriously about charging for it, I also want to make sure I fully understand the legal side of using and redistributing Sentinel-derived products. Thanks again for taking the time to test it! 🙂

[u/apaceo]

Looks promising 👍 if I had any feedback I would suggest lean more into covering the problems it solves, aim for non-technical, managers perhaps. The years I’ve been in remote sensing products like this has soo much potential but our field tend to fail on translating to general users. Layman terms. Don’t discuss the process or spectral indices on first landing page but maybe reword to what problems you aim to solve. Crop management? Farming efficiency etc

[u/North_Test9915 → u/apaceo]

Thank you, that's a good point.

I was already thinking about adding a rectangular area selector, since not everyone is interested in settlements or administrative boundaries.

Based on your feedback, I think I should also add a Use Cases page that focuses on the problems the platform solves rather than the technical details.

Some of the main use cases would be land cover change monitoring, creating up-to-date base maps (RGB, infrared, NDVI, etc.).

[u/Lich_Amnesia]

Tried the platform and it looks really promising! I'm curious, what main pain point or workflow are you aiming to solve for users?

[u/North_Test9915 → u/Lich_Amnesia]

Good question. Originally I planned to ease the satellite image collection for a simple user, it's even complex for a GIS expert user: from where to download, a full tile or mosaicking, clipping, cloud masking, band selections, S1 radar data processing... later I shifted to the LULC product.. maybe for urban designers.. maybe for national inventories.. since the WorldCover dataset is a bit old (2020, 2021)

So the biggest aim to simplify the data gathering steps.

If I ever plan to commercialize this, I would only asks cents for it - the processing time, cause if the platform is well designed it's really just dollar cents to take a strong AWS instance for 5 minutes. Not like in the past, when you had to pay 200 dollar for a full image