A Veritas Imagery service

Hypervision

Hyperspectral imaging — seeing what colour alone can't tell you.

A conventional satellite records three broad colours. A hyperspectral sensor records hundreds of narrow, contiguous ones — enough to recognise a material by the way it reflects light. Hypervision brings that capability to market from orbit, with regular global coverage.

Start a projectWhat it does

The difference

Three bands, or three hundred.

Standard optical imagery divides visible light into red, green and blue. Hyperspectral divides a far wider range — out through near infrared and into shortwave infrared, to around 2,500nm — into hundreds of narrow, contiguous slices. It is the shape of that curve, not the colour, that identifies what is on the ground.

Standard optical

3 broad bands

Hyperspectral

Hundreds of contiguous bands

Blue
Green
Red
NIR
SWIR
400nm70014002500nm
Three broad channels are enough to see what something looks like. They are not enough to tell apart two materials that happen to look alike — the features that separate them mostly sit beyond red, in the infrared. The wavelength axis above is compressed past the visible so the three optical bands stay legible.

Every pixel is a spectrum

Not a wider picture. A deeper one.

The footprint on the ground is the same in all three cases. What changes is how much sits behind each pixel of it — three numbers, a dozen, or several hundred. That depth is the data, and it is what a material can be identified from.

RGB3 bandsMultispectral~10 bandsHyperspectralHundreds of bands

Capabilities

What the spectrum gives you.

Material identification

Spectral signatures

Every material reflects light in a pattern of its own. With hundreds of narrow bands rather than three broad ones, that pattern can be matched against a library — so the question moves from what colour is it to what is it made of.

Vegetation and crop health

Red edge · NIR

Stress, species and moisture content register in the spectrum well before they show as visible change, making problems detectable while there is still time to act on them.

Minerals and soils

SWIR

Alteration minerals, clays and iron oxides each carry diagnostic absorption features, supporting exploration targeting and ground characterisation from orbit.

Gas and plume detection

Emissions

Certain gases absorb at known wavelengths, so releases can be identified and attributed rather than merely observed as a haze.

In practice

What the bands are for.

Four products from four different sensors. Each one is derived from a reflectance curve rather than from what the scene looks like, which is why none of them could be produced from a conventional image of the same ground.

Nitrogen content mapped field by field across farmland, from a single pass.
Crop health. Nitrogen content mapped field by field across farmland, from a single pass.
A methane plume over a facility, with the wind direction that lets it be traced back to a source rather than only recorded.
Gas detection. A methane plume over a facility, with the wind direction that lets it be traced back to a source rather than only recorded.
Alteration minerals keyed by type across a mine — the signatures that indicate copper and gold.
Minerals. Alteration minerals keyed by type across a mine — the signatures that indicate copper and gold.
Visible, then near infrared, then the spectral match that separates algae-affected water from the rest of the reservoir.
Water quality. Visible, then near infrared, then the spectral match that separates algae-affected water from the rest of the reservoir.

Applications

Where it changes the answer.

Anywhere the question is what something is, or what condition it is in, rather than simply where it is.

Precision agriculture and yield forecasting
Mineral exploration and alteration mapping
Methane and industrial emissions monitoring
Water quality, algal bloom and turbidity assessment
Forestry species classification and stress detection
Contamination, tailings and spill characterisation

Sourcing

The sensors behind it.

Hyperspectral data has historically come from aircraft. We source it from orbit, through the operators building constellations specifically for it.

See our hyperspectral operators

Tell us what you need to identify.

Send us the area and the material or condition you're trying to detect, and we'll advise on whether hyperspectral is the right instrument for it.

Start a projectSee our operators