This week we launched v1.1 of the Vexcel API. Among the dozens of bug fixes and minor improvements is one very big feature; the ability to access near-infrared (NIR) imagery via API. Until now NIR was available for direct download from cloud storage. Access to NIR just became a lot easier to integrate into your applications and workflows with these API enhancements.

There are two important API enhancements making it easy to work with NIR

• ‘rendering’ parameter on FindImage, FindImagesInPoint, and FindImagesInPolygon methods. When requesting metadata with any of the ‘Find’ methods, you can now easily filter to return only near infrared imagery. Values for this new parameter include all, rgb, and nir. Read more in the docs here.
• ExtractNIRImages service. this new service is very similar to ExtractImages which returns true colored imagery. All of the usual parameters you would expect to see are here; filter by date, specify location as a point or polygon, image size etc…. The full documentation for this method is here.

Lets look at how to use these two methods together. We’ll use 47.6141,-122.319 as our target location.

Start by calling FindImagesInPoint to see what Near infrared imagery is available here. We’ll limit the layers to just the 7.5cm blue sky layers and using the ‘rendering’ parameter, we will request that only nir images be returned.
https://api.gic.org/metadata/FindImagesInPoint?layer=bluesky-ultra,bluesky-ultra-g&rendering=nir&format=json&EPSG=4326&orientation=all&wkt=POINT(-122.319+47.6141)&AuthToken=[YOURTOKENHERE]

You can then parse the resulting JSON and select the image you want to request. Use the ExtractNIRImages method to do so:
https://api.gic.org/images/ExtractNIRImages/bluesky-ultra?mode=one&logo=yes&imagename=2019~us-wa-seattle-2019~nadir~44738-lvl02-color_ir&EPSG=4326&xcoordinate=-122.319&ycoordinate=47.6141&zoom=0&width=800&height=600&AuthToken=%5BYOURTOKENHERE%5D

The result will be an image like this:

If you have questions as you get started head over to the support center and let us know