Precision Ag News

Precision Farming with Satellite Imaging

Research with ESA on new cameras, hyperspectral cameras flying on drones are now able to see details as small as 4–5 cm.

Customers are already using the first version of the ButterflEYE LS camera: in Denmark for biological diversity studies, in Australia for agricultural research, and in Italy for providing commercial data to farmers.

"Our first customers were really keen on getting the high resolution, which is the best you can currently get from a hyperspectral product," said René Michels, CEO of Germany's airborne specialist Cubert, who collaborated with Belgium's VITO Remote Sensing and imec for the camera development.

The camera exploits the potential of a novel hyperspectral imaging chip from imec by combining it with VITO's image processing honed by working with ESA on remote sensing satellites.

Weighing just 400g, the powerful camera fits easily on a small unmanned aircraft to deliver detailed measurements for precision agriculture but it has also potential in forestry, biomass monitoring, waste and pollution management.

Harnessing the power of colour
"Hyperspectral imaging captures many very narrow wavelength bands in the visible and near-infrared instead of the more typical three or four broad spectral bands: red, green, blue and, sometimes, infrared."

A prism has been used to separate the colours but this results in complex optics and larger cameras. Following VITO's work on the Proba-V satellite, ESA's Luca Maresi set the company a challenge of producing a lightweight hyperspectral camera based on a different technology.

Space spin-off helps on Earth
To make the camera even more versatile and suitable for mass production, imec created an ultra-small sensor with the hyperspectral filter incorporated. Cubert used this filter-in-chip sensor in their new ButterflEYE LS camera.

Hyperspectral cameras produce huge amounts of data that have to be downloaded to VITO's cloud computing environment to be processed to produce the required information, including action maps to help the customer.

Source :https://phys.org/news/