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NOTE Effective January 31, 2026, ARD will no longer be available as an API programmatic ordering option for imagery through our platform. See the deprecation notice.

Visual Image

Overview​

The visual format converts the source imagery to an 8-bit range suitable for visual display.

Images from multiband sensors (Worldview 2, 3, and 4) are:

  • Orthorectified
  • Pansharpened using panchromatic and multiband images
  • Red-Green-Blue bands only
  • Radiometrically balanced per tile
  • Dynamic range adjusted to 8-bits per band (RGB)
  • Resampled to 0.30517578125m pixel size and aligned to the ARD grid

Images acquired by Worldview 1 are only panchromatic so they are:

  • Radiometrically balanced per tile
  • Dynamic range adjusted to 8-bit (greyscale)
  • Resampled to 0.30517578125m pixel size and aligned to the ARD grid

Files are delivered as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG):

  • processed using GDAL's COG output format using default settings
  • RGB images use JPEG YCbCr compression
  • Panchromatic images use DEFLATE compression
  • NoData pixels are encoded in a mask band

Example image​

This example shows a "visual" pan-sharpened image over San Francisco, CA USA.

visual pansharpened RGB image

Bands​

Visual RGB imagery has the following three bands:

band namecommon namedescription
BAND_RredRed
BAND_GgreenGreen
BAND_BblueBlue

Panchromatic visual imagery has one band:

band namedescription
BAND_P_VPan Visual

File information​

File type: Raster GeoTIFF

File name: {acquisitionID}-visual.tif

File path: bucket or location/prefix/UTM zone/quadkey/acquisition date/