General introduction
The research group focuses on R&D activities connected to remote sensing and satellite data which is closely linked to developments of global satellite systems. The long-term goal of the research group is to establish an independent and commercial remote sensing and satellite data providing base. The targeted areas are agriculture, water management, environmental protection and nature conservation, digitized crop production and damage prediction and the development of decision support IT systems. The data providing contains the monitoring of environmental changes and phenomena, the recording of digital data stream in uniform data management systems, documentation, the spatial analysis and evaluation of environmental changes, the exploration of intervention possibilities and alternatives.
List of actual R&D activities
The actual R&D activities and tasks of the research group are the following:
- i) Development of the pre-process of Sentinel-1,2 and Landsat images. Downloading time series data to test areas and using atmospheric correction with Sen2Cor, Fmask, ENVI QUACK and MAYA algorithms.
- ii) Thematic analyses based on pre-processed satellite imagery (especially focusing on agriculture and forestry) using machine learning and object-oriented image classification (OBIA)
- iii) Development of automated image classification workflow to process and evaluate Sentinel-1,2 and Landsat 8 data for agriculture and forestry: e.g. detecting damages caused by pests or pathogens, effects of drought.
- iv) Testing and calibrating hyperspectral satellite data, evaluating the applicability of HS imagery for agriculture and forestry applications
- v) Evaluation of land cover - derived from remote sensing data - based on landscape metrics, where environmental changes are analysed using time series data to support nature conservation activities.
- vi) Analysis of time series satellite imagery to monitor the expansion of urban areas and the conversion of agricultural fields.