EPSSI - Exploring the Potential of the Sentinel missions Satellite Imagery

Title: EPSSI - Exploring the Potential of the Sentinel missions Satellite Imagery

Principal investigator: Cidália Costa Fonte

Research team: Cidália Costa Fonte, Joaquim Patriarca, Jacinto Estima – Universidade Europeia / INESC ID, Grant holders

Dates start/end: 1st of November 2019/31 October 2020

Synopsis

EPSSI aims to explore the potential of using satellite imagery collected by the Sentinel missions from the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency (ESA) for the needs of the contemporary society. Two of the main applications that will be considered, due to their relevance, include the identification of Algae Bloom Events (ABE) in water bodies, and the delineation of agriculture and forest parcels in the Portuguese landscape. On the one hand, the presence of ABE has negative impacts for human health. On the other hand, monitoring agricultural and forest parcels (i.e. the regular identification of their location, dimension and type of coverage) is needed for several reasons, including the attribution of agricultural subsidies. Therefore, exploring sentinel outputs for earth observation is key to tackle these challenges. Another relevant aspect that will be exploited is the automation of imagery classification processes in order to create high quality updated products with efficiency, so that the temporal resolution of the collected images (i.e. interval of time taken between the collection of images from the same location on Earth) may be fully exploited. This includes the development of automated methodologies for creating training samples and validation procedures.