Tools · Google Maps Platform
Google Earth and Earth Engine: the planet as a working surface
The Tools family is where Google Maps Platform stops being an API you call and becomes a surface you analyse on. Google Earth is a comprehensive, interactive model of the world to analyse, build and collaborate in. Earth Engine on Google Cloud is a multi-petabyte catalogue of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities. Lepton licenses both and delivers the analysis work on top.
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Drag to spin the planet Two products, one family
An interactive Earth, and the engine behind it
Google Earth is the working globe: high-resolution imagery and terrain for the whole planet, in the browser, where teams measure, draw, annotate and share. It is where a question about the ground starts, because it is the fastest way to look at any place on Earth at any recorded point in time.
Earth Engine is what answers the question at scale. It pairs a multi-petabyte, continuously updated catalogue of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis that runs on Google Cloud, next to the data. You write the analysis; Google runs it across decades of imagery without any of it ever landing on your own machines.
What teams do with it
Where the imagery catalogue earns its keep
- 01
Vegetation · NDVI and crop monitoring
Vegetation indices computed across seasons and years, for agriculture, forestry and land management teams that need condition and trend rather than a single snapshot.
- 02
Land use · Classification and change detection
Classify land use and land cover from the catalogue, then diff it across time: where construction appeared, where water receded, where the city actually grew versus where it was planned to.
- 03
Infrastructure · Monitoring along an asset
Watch a corridor rather than a point: rights of way, pipelines, transmission lines and rail alignments monitored for encroachment and surface change from imagery instead of patrols alone.
- 04
Environment · Water, terrain and risk
Surface-water mapping, terrain models and multi-decade histories that put an environmental or disaster-risk question on evidence rather than on a site visit.
Access, honestly
What has to be granted before the first analysis
Earth Engine is free for noncommercial research and education, and commercial use is licensed through Google Cloud. That licence, the project setup and the quota model are exactly the kind of commercial construct a Premier Partner structures every week: we scope the usage tier against what your analysis actually runs, so the licence matches the workload rather than the brochure.
Where Lepton comes in
We run production analysis on this surface
- 01
Delivery · The pipeline, not just the licence
NDVI, land use and change-detection pipelines built and run on Earth Engine, with results delivered where your teams work: BigQuery, your GIS, or a dashboard.
- 02
Integration · One vendor across the stack
Earth Engine sits beside the rest of the platform we integrate: BigQuery for the results, the Maps surfaces for display, and one commercial relationship across all of it.
- 03
Scoping · The right dataset for the question
The catalogue is enormous, and most of it is irrelevant to any one question. We shortlist the collections, the resolution and the revisit rate your answer actually needs before anything is licensed.
Bring the question, not the imagery.
Tell us what you need to see change on the ground. We scope the datasets, the Earth Engine pipeline and the licence.
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