Image Layers

Image Layers#

What is an Image Layer?#

An image layer is the object upon which labeling, training, and predictions are performed. An image layer can be a single TIFF file, or multiple TIFF files for the same geographical Area of Interest.

If you have multiple satellite image files for a geographical area of interest, you can upload them all together and HASTE will combine them into a single mosaic.

Sources#

There are multiple providers of satellite imagery for damage assessment, including but not limited to the following:

Planet Disaster Data — https://source.coop/planet/disasterdata
Vantor Open Data Program — https://vantor.com/company/open-data-program//

Formats#

At the moment, HASTE only accepts TIFF (.tif) files as valid imagery formats.

Sample data to try HASTE#

Want to try HASTE without sourcing your own imagery first? The Microsoft AI for Good Lab hosts a few public post-disaster samples you can drop straight into an image layer.

Dataset	File	Use as	Best for
Black River (Planet)	`black-river_visual_mosaic_cog.tif`	Post-event imagery	Either workflow
Black River (Planet)	`black-river_footprints.gpkg`	Custom building footprints	Rapid Building Assessment
Lahaina, Maui — Vantor / Maxar, 12 Aug 2023	`maxar_lahaina_8_12_2023-visual.tif`	Post-event imagery	Damage Mapping (train a model)

How to use them

Imagery — on the Create Image Layer form, paste the .tif URL into the post-event imagery URL field, or download it and upload the file. (These samples are post-event only; pre-event imagery is optional in both workflows.)
Footprints — download the .gpkg and upload it under Custom Building Footprints (the URL option requires Azure Blob Storage or S3 hosting). Footprints are only needed for the Building workflow; the Standard workflow doesn’t require them.

Note

The Black River post-event image (black-river_visual_mosaic_cog.tif) is a mosaic of all the individual visual assets in Planet’s Hurricane Melissa 2025 Black River disaster data. This set pairs post-event imagery with matching building footprints, so it’s a complete example for Rapid Building Assessment. The Lahaina scene is imagery only — a good fit for Damage Mapping, where footprints are pulled automatically from Overture Maps.

Create a New Image Layer#

To create an Image Layer, you must first create a project. Once this is done, select the desired project from the list of projects. The project details will be displayed, which includes a button called Create Image Layer. Clicking this will take you to the Image Layer creation form.

Choose a workflow

The creation form has a workflow selector that determines what you can do with the layer:

Standard — draw labels and train a model for a wall-to-wall damage map (Damage Mapping).
Building — embed building footprints and label them interactively (Rapid Building Assessment).

The workflow selector on the Create Image Layer form

Add imagery files by providing publicly accessible URLs or uploading files from a local directory that show the Area of Interest (AOI). You can also combine files from both a URL and a local directory. If multiple files are provided in a section, they will be merged into a single GeoTIFF image; therefore, all files in each section must correspond to the same AOI. All files must be valid GeoTIFF (.tif) files.

Custom building footprints (optional)#

By default, HASTE downloads building footprints automatically from Overture Maps for the area covered by your post-event imagery. If you’d rather use your own, expand the Custom Building Footprints panel on the create form, turn on Use custom building footprints (skip Overture download), and supply a single GeoPackage (.gpkg) — either a publicly accessible URL or a file upload (one or the other).

HASTE reprojects the file to EPSG:4326 and clips it to the imagery area before use. The Overture and custom paths produce the same kind of footprint layer, so the rest of the workflow is identical either way.

The Custom Building Footprints panel on the Create Image Layer form

Note

A custom footprints file must be:

Format — a GeoPackage (.gpkg), one file per layer, up to 500 MB.
Projected — it must have a coordinate reference system embedded (any CRS works; it’s reprojected to EPSG:4326).
Polygons — Polygon / MultiPolygon features only (other geometry types are dropped).
Hosted (URL option) — the URL must point to Azure Blob Storage or AWS S3.

Footprints are set when the layer is created and can’t be changed afterward.

Download layer data#

An image layer’s ⋯ (more actions) menu offers exports that don’t depend on any model:

Export Labels to GeoJSON — the labels drawn on the layer.
Download Building Footprints — the footprints used for the layer (Overture or your own).
Download Valid Area Mask — the area actually covered by the imagery.

The image layer more-actions menu

Edit an Image Layer#

You can update the name and description for an image layer after it was created from the Projects page.

Delete an Image Layer#

You can delete an image layer using the ellipsis menu on the Projects page.

Deleting an image layer also deletes all its artifacts such as labels, model training checkpoints, and predictions.