Here you will find the core information for week 4 remote sensing, Earth Observation (EO) data and image processing. The data files are zipped up and too large to be uploaded here so they are linked in the EDSML Teams channel, under Part_4_Mason.
On successful completion of this module, students will be able to:
- Understand the physical principles of remote sensing (passive and active), sensors technology, and their benefits and limitations for various applications
- Demonstrate competance in executing standard image processing tools and techniques, to extract thematic information from EO data. So you will learn important image processing tools for contrast enhancement, algebraic operations, colour transformations & enhancements, and pan-sharpening
- Develop a basic understanding of SAR imaging and its benefits
- Become familiar with all the major sources of EO data, and their uses
This course is focused on the understanding of physical principles, maths concepts and data, rather than on coding (the latter you can experiment with and develop by yourselves). There are six lectures and related practical exercises. The practical exercises will use a few simple offline datasets for processing. To maximise the amount we can cover in this time, we will use two ready software tools:
- A flexible, powerful and transparent image processing tool called ERDAS 2013 (aka ERMapper). This is available on the Software Hub and runs on Windows only these days. If you are using your own laptop/desktop, you need to check you can access the College SoftwareHub directly from it.
https://softwarehub.imperial.ac.uk/login
Otherwise, if you are not attending in person, you will need to remotely access the College PC cluster
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/ict/self-service/connect-communicate/remote-access/remotely-access-my-college-computer/remote-desktop-access-for-students/
The optical image datasets for use in this part of the course are here:
- ESA SNAP Toolbox which was developed for processing of Copernicus Sentinel datasets - this should be downloaded and installed locally (Win & Mac versions available) Practical exercise instructions will appear in pdf form on the EDSML Teams channel.
The S1 SAR SLC image product for the last exercise can be downloaded here (its 4GB!)
Here is a shameless plug for our book on image processing which is in the College library and has been ripped online in various places https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118687963
There are plentiful and growing resources (and ready code) available for EO applications in many repositories:
-
EO processing framework for ML in Python - extracting information from satellite imagery made easy! htpps://eo-learn https://pypi.org/project/eo-learn
-
Tons of geospatial and EO recipes, tools and tutorials by colleagues Andrew Cutts & Alistair Graham, which developed from his groundbreaking podcast and blog called #scenefromabove a few years ago
https://github.com/arcgeospatial/awesome-earthobservation-code -
A bunch of resources set up for a 2019 conference to link EO and ML
https://github.com/sentinel-hub/eo-learn-workshop -
Python tools for geospatial analysis
https://github.com/earthlab/earth-analytics-python-env -
ESE Jupyter notebooks (by Raul Adraeinsen)
https://primer-computational-mathematics.github.io/book/d_geosciences/remote_sensing/intro.html -
Earth data science & analytics python course
https://www.earthdatascience.org/courses/earth-analytics-python -
All the raster data format descriptors and drivers you will ever need at GDAL
https://www.gdal.org
| Date | Lecture topic | Instructor | Moderators |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 06/12/21 09.00-12.00 | Physical principles of remote sensing, sensors, resolution and raster data, data sources | Philippa | Emma & Sam |
| Mon 06/12/21 14.00-17.00 | Application of point operations and contrast enhancement techniques | Philippa | Emma & Sam |
| Tue 07/12/21 09.00-12.00 | Application of multi-band algebraic operations to produce spectral indices | Philippa | Emma & Sam |
| Tue 07/12/21 14.00-17.00 | Principles and use of colour coordinate transformations & their uses | Philippa | Emma & Sam |
| Wed 08/12/21 09.00-12.00 | Bare essentials of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging and (a brief) introduction to InSAR | Philppa | Emma & Sam |
| Thu 09/12/21 09.00-12.00 | Students work in groups to develop and App on GEE | Shuaib | Philippa, Emma & Sam |
| Thu 09/12/21 15.00-17.00 | Student groups present their app | Shuaib | Philippa, Emma & Sam |
Assessment will be 100% coursework and open book The exercise will be released and submitted via GitHub Classroom on Friday
| Release date/time | Due date/time | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Fri 10/12/21 13.00 | Fri 10/12/21 17.00 | EO image processing - link will be sent just before 13.00 |