Works underway on an innovative solution for satellite crop monitoring

18 lutego 2022

European agricultural paying agencies, large farm enterprises and even individual farmers will soon be offered an innovative tool to monitor and analyse agricultural crops. CloudFerro, a Polish cloud services provider, is working on a new project, Agrotech, to develop a solution for crop classification and change detection through the analysis of medium and VHR (very high resolution) satellite images using machine learning algorithms.

Satellite crop monitoring is not a new technology. It is already used by many agriculture companies, state organisations and business (e.g. insurance companies, investors) who want to make reasonable decisions based on highly reliable data on crops condition. The main advantages of monitoring the crops with satellite data are the consistency and repeatability of data and high accuracy of measurements resulting from them.

Apart from the classification of land cover for Europe and the recognition of crop types, the Agrotech solution will offer additional benefits, such as the detection of physical damage into crops, the detection of selected diseases or crop growth monitoring. The system will operate through the analysis of medium and very high-resolution satellite images with the use of an advanced machine learning algorithm. It will also enable the processing of all the data in a cloud environment without cumbersome and time-consuming downloading large volumes of Earth observation (EO) satellite data from an EO repository to the user’s IT infrastructure.

Copernicus, Sentinel, 2021_fields.

There are two stages of R&D process planned in the project. The first one, industrial research, will include the use of entirely new methods and algorithms for automatic extraction of land cover and land use patterns, effective methods for segmentation of multi-spectral satellite images and methods for recognition of objects subject to significant periodical variability.

In the second stage – an experimental development – the algorithms developed in the first stage will be taught to classify all the planned crops and types of land area. Then, the prototype of the target platform will be built and subject to tests and verification in real conditions.

CloudFerro has signed an agreement with the Polish National Center for Research and Development (NCBiR) for funding the project and the works are already underway. Agrotech is co-funded from the European Regional Development Fund. The prototype of the system is planned to be ready by the end of February 2023 and the ready-to-use solution will be launched at the beginning of 2024.

CloudFerro is the operator of CREODIAS platform (one of five Data Access Information Service platforms providing cloud environments to exploit Copernicus collections) offering free access to Earth Observation satellite data and cloud services developed for the European Space Agency.

About CloudFerro:

CloudFerro provides innovative cloud services. The company delivers and operates cloud computing platforms for demanding markets, such as the European space sector, climate research and science. Its broad experience and in-depth expertise include storing and processing big data sets, such as multipetabyte repositories of Earth Observation satellite data. The company offers cost-effective, open-source-based, flexible cloud solutions in a public, private or hybrid model, customized to meet user needs. Extensive range of ancillary services and dedicated technical support are provided by the highly experienced local team of IT specialists with unmatched competences. CloudFerro has been trusted by leading European firms and scientific institutions from various big-data-processing market sectors, including the European Space Agency (ESA), EUMETSAT, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Mercator Ocean International, German Aerospace Centre (DLR), the EGI, to name a few.