RADIAN
RADIAN is TerraLens' Radar Image Analysis Toolkit, a desktop application that turns commercial and public SAR satellite imagery into change detection, construction monitoring and automatic target recognition for defence, security and public decision-making teams, deployed on-premise.
What is RADIAN?
RADIAN is the Radar Image Analysis Toolkit published by TerraLens GmbH, a German company based in Gilching, near Munich. It is a desktop application for visual analysis of Earth observation data, built on over two decades of research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). TerraLens was created as the spin-off that turns those image processing algorithms into an operational product, closing what it describes as the gap between scientific prototyping and operational requirements.
The toolkit works with commercial and public satellite data and concentrates on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors. SAR matters because it images the ground day and night and sees through cloud cover, so acquisition does not depend on daylight or weather, which is decisive when a site has to be watched on a fixed schedule.
Three capabilities are presented. Visual Change Detection compares two images taken from the same repeat orbit and returns a colour-coded map: red for what appeared, green for what disappeared, blue for stationary structures, yellow for small displacements. Automatic Construction Monitoring narrows that signal down to building and infrastructure work, filtering out the parasitic changes that saturate an urban scene, such as traffic and vegetation, and it therefore needs long time series. Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) is an end-to-end AI system: the operator annotates their own data, enlarges the training set with simulated signatures, trains and refines classifiers, then runs recognition on new imagery. TerraLens presents ATR as its answer to speckle noise, multiple reflections and the other radar imaging effects that make SAR hard to read.
Four product arguments are advanced: data sovereignty through on-premise deployment with full control over data and operations; data diversity through the fusion of varied sensors; ease of use, through an interface presented as requiring no deep technical expertise; and performance, through algorithms optimised for NVIDIA GPUs.
The range has three tiers carrying different commercial statuses, and only one of them is sold today. RADIAN Desktop is listed Ready for sale. RADIAN Server, which the publisher says can be triggered flexibly over an API, is listed Sales in 2026. Monitoring Services is listed Coming soon. The website itself is a six-page one-pager with no pricing page, no contact page and no API documentation.
What it does
- Detect ground changes between two SAR acquisitions taken from the same repeat orbit
- Produce a colour-coded change map that can be read without radar expertise
- Detect and automatically track the construction or demolition of buildings and infrastructure
- Recognise objects automatically in SAR imagery through automatic target recognition (ATR)
- Annotate your own data and enlarge the training set with simulated signatures
- Train and refine classifiers against your own operational requirements
- Fuse satellite data from different sensors and process large volumes on NVIDIA GPUs
When to use RADIAN / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if RADIAN is the right fit.
When to use RADIAN
- Defence and intelligence organisations that already exploit SAR satellite imagery
- Teams bound to an on-premise deployment for data sovereignty reasons
- Imagery analysts who must process large SAR volumes without deep radar processing expertise
- Public administrations and policy decision-makers who need a situational picture built from Earth observation data
- Teams that want to train their own ATR classifiers on their own annotated data, including for long-run infrastructure and construction monitoring
When not to use RADIAN
- Anyone looking for a self-service product: there is no online purchase and no sign-up, and the only way in is an emailed demonstration request
- Anyone who needs a public price: no amount, no tier and no currency is published anywhere on the site
- Anyone who needs the server tier or the monitoring service today: they are listed Sales in 2026 and Coming soon respectively
- Anyone who requires a hosted SaaS offering: what is sold is an installed desktop application running on the customer's own premises
- Anyone working with mainstream optical imagery, or who requires public API documentation: the toolkit is SAR-centred and no API documentation is published
How to use RADIAN
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Request a demonstration by email: the site's two calls to action, Book a Demo and Let's Collaborate, both open a mailto to info@terralens.de, and there is no online purchase and no self-service sign-up
- Agree commercial terms directly with TerraLens, since no price, tier, free plan or trial is published
- Install RADIAN Desktop inside your own on-premise ecosystem: it is an installed desktop application, not a hosted web service
- Provision NVIDIA GPUs, on which the processing performance announced by the publisher depends
- Load commercial or public SAR data and run Visual Change Detection on two images from the same repeat orbit, then read the colour-coded result
- For construction monitoring, acquire long time series so that building work stands out from the parasitic changes of an urban scene
- For automatic target recognition, annotate your own data, enlarge the training set with simulated signatures, train and refine a classifier, then run recognition on new acquisitions
- Note that RADIAN Server, which the publisher says can be triggered over an API, is listed Sales in 2026, and that no publicly accessible API documentation exists to plan an integration against
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Traceable scientific origin: the image processing algorithms come from DLR, the German Aerospace Center
- On-premise deployment, with full control over data and operations claimed by the publisher
- A complete end-to-end ATR chain the customer can train on their own annotated data, rather than a pre-trained black box
- SAR imaging works day and night and through cloud cover, where optical imagery does not
- Change detection output is colour-coded and designed to be read without radar expertise
- Multi-sensor data fusion and announced NVIDIA GPU acceleration for large volumes
- A European publisher, with the website hosted in Germany and complete legal notices: commercial register entry, VAT number and named managing directors
Cons
- No public price whatsoever: no amount, no currency, no tier, no free trial and no free plan anywhere on the site
- A very thin web presence, six pages in all with two of them purely legal, and no pricing page, no contact page, no terms and conditions and no API documentation
- Two of the three tiers are not on sale: RADIAN Server is listed Sales in 2026 and Monitoring Services Coming soon
- No self-service at all: the only call to action is a mailto link to info@terralens.de, and a single generic address serves every purpose, with no dedicated support channel
- No security certification is published, neither ISO nor SOC 2 nor any national accreditation, even though the product targets the security and defence market
- The privacy policy covers the website only: nothing is published about how RADIAN handles a customer's own data
- No interface screenshot, no online demonstration, no public technical documentation, and no social account either
Pricing & Plans
TerraLens publishes no pricing information for RADIAN. There is no amount, no currency, no tier and no billing unit anywhere on the site, and no free plan or free trial is advertised: a mechanical check of the four archived pages, in English and in German alike, returned no monetary symbol and no pricing keyword. No pricing page exists either, /pricing/ and /preise/ both returning a genuine 404, and both the sitemap and the WordPress REST API confirm that the site holds only six pages. RADIAN Desktop is listed Ready for sale with no price attached. The only commercial route is a demonstration request: the Book a Demo and Let's Collaborate buttons both open a mailto to info@terralens.de. Pricing therefore has to be obtained directly from the publisher.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how RADIAN handles your data.
GDPR overview
TerraLens publishes a full German-style privacy policy naming both the GDPR and the TDDDG, in English at /datenschutzerklaerung/ and in German at /de/datenschutzerklaerung/. It identifies the controller with postal address, telephone number and email, lists the legal bases relied on, claims SSL/TLS encryption in transit, and sets out data subject rights: information, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, portability, withdrawal of consent, objection under Art. 21, and complaint to a supervisory authority. Third-country transfers are addressed, with reference to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. The policy designates no data protection officer, and names no Art. 27 representative, which is consistent for a controller established in Germany. No effective date and no last-updated date appears in the policy. Scope matters: it covers website visitors, not the processing RADIAN performs at a customer's own site.
Who owns the data?
Two scopes have to be kept apart. For the website, TerraLens GmbH, Untere Läng 3b, 82205 Gilching, declares itself the data processing controller, reachable on +49 8105 39880 50 and at info@terralens.de; visitor data is handled under its privacy policy. For RADIAN itself, nothing is formalised publicly: the product is deployed inside the customer's own on-premise ecosystem, and the site states only that this ensures full control over data and operations. No terms of use, EULA or licence agreement is published, so ownership of the imagery processed and of the classifiers a customer trains is defined by no publicly available contract.
Reuse rights
The published rules cover the website only. TerraLens states that it collects what a visitor enters into a contact form, plus automatic technical data such as browser, operating system and time of access, and that it uses this to provide the site free of errors, to analyse usage patterns through analysis programs, and to process enquiries, offers and orders where a contract can be concluded through the site. The legal bases cited are Art. 6(1)(a), (b), (c) and (f) GDPR, Art. 9(2)(a), Art. 49(1)(a) and section 25(1) TDDDG. Transfers outside the EU are declared to the United States for Calendly, under standard contractual clauses and an EU-US Data Privacy Framework certification, and for Wordfence, under standard contractual clauses. Nothing anywhere on the site addresses the training of AI models on customer or visitor data, neither to permit it nor to rule it out. And because RADIAN runs on the customer's own infrastructure with no licence agreement published, what an end user may do with the imagery, the change maps and the classifiers the tool produces is governed by no publicly available document.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Two scopes, again. The website is hosted by Strato AG, Otto-Ostrowski-Straße 7, 10249 Berlin, Germany, which the privacy policy names and which records logfiles including visitor IP addresses. Independent technical checks agree: the site resolves to 81.169.145.70, geolocated in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on AS6724 Strato GmbH, the name servers are shades04.rzone.de and docks13.rzone.de, and the mail exchanger is smtpin.rzone.de, all Strato infrastructure. The policy also declares transfers to the United States for two website services, Calendly in Atlanta, Georgia and Wordfence / Defiant Inc in Seattle, Washington. RADIAN itself is hosted by the customer: the product is deployed inside the customer's on-premise ecosystem, and the site describes no hosting of operational imagery by TerraLens. The jurisdiction covering a customer's SAR data is therefore the customer's own, not Germany by virtue of the website's hosting, and no published document describes that arrangement.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting RADIAN.
- The homepage counter reads 20+ Years of experience: those two decades belong to the research carried out at DLR, and are not the age of TerraLens or of RADIAN
- Only RADIAN Desktop is listed Ready for sale; RADIAN Server is listed Sales in 2026 and Monitoring Services Coming soon, so check what is actually deliverable before planning around them
- The API claim concerns RADIAN Server, which is not yet on sale, and no publicly accessible API documentation exists to verify or build against
- The privacy policy describes the website (Strato hosting, Calendly, Wordfence); it does not describe how RADIAN handles customer data, and no terms of use or licence agreement is published at all
- The data processing agreement quoted in the privacy policy is the one TerraLens concluded with its own hosting provider, not a DPA offered to RADIAN customers
- The privacy policy declares Calendly for appointment booking, yet no trace of Calendly appears in the code served: the only contact route on the site is a mailto link
- No precise incorporation date is published, the site giving only the year 2022, and no security certification is published despite a security and defence positioning
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
The publisher promises rapid adoption thanks to intuitive user interfaces - no deep technical expertise required. The practical bar sits higher. Deployment is on-premise, so it falls to the customer's own infrastructure; the announced performance assumes NVIDIA GPUs; the ATR chain demands real operator work, from annotating data to augmenting the training set and training and refining classifiers; and construction monitoring only works once long time series have been acquired. No installation documentation, getting-started guide or detailed system requirement is published. Expect a project-scale rollout supported directly by the publisher, not an install-and-go tool.
Deployment
Behind RADIAN
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What is RADIAN?
Who publishes RADIAN?
How much does RADIAN cost?
How do I get hold of RADIAN?
Is RADIAN an online service, and where is data hosted?
Does RADIAN offer an API?
What does the change detection do?
Can RADIAN be trained to recognise my own objects?
Which satellite data does RADIAN use, and why SAR rather than optical imagery?
What hardware does RADIAN need?
Should you pick RADIAN?
RADIAN is a specialist instrument, not a general-purpose one. It reads synthetic aperture radar imagery, and the whole product is organised around what SAR makes possible: acquisition by day, by night and through cloud, compared across repeat orbits to show what appeared, disappeared, stayed put or shifted slightly. Its technical credibility rests on two things, algorithms born of over two decades of research at DLR that TerraLens was spun off to industrialise, and an ATR chain the customer trains on their own annotated data instead of a black box shipped pre-trained. The intended audience follows from that: security, defence and public decision-making, where the sovereignty requirement is answered by on-premise deployment.
For a directory reader, the difficulty is commercial opacity. Nothing is priced. There is no self-service route, no online demonstration, no interface screenshot, no public technical documentation and no terms of use; the entire web presence runs to six pages, two of them legal notices. The single way in is an emailed demonstration request. Maturity is uneven too: of the three announced tiers, only RADIAN Desktop is listed Ready for sale, RADIAN Server is listed Sales in 2026 and Monitoring Services Coming soon, so the API the publisher mentions belongs to a tier not yet sold and has no publicly accessible documentation.
What reassures is identification. The publisher is a named German company, TerraLens GmbH in Gilching, with complete legal notices: HRB 275574 at the Amtsgericht München, VAT number DE353241736, three named managing directors, and a privacy policy that engages with the GDPR in detail even though it covers the website alone. TerraLens says it was founded in 2022. Judge RADIAN on a demonstration, because nothing else is public.
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