UPM Satellite Ground Station Data for Borneo NDVI Image Analysis

Abstract

Small satellites have been developed and used for earth observations as the remote sensing data can be used to perform analysis such as weather forecasts, vegetation monitorings, climate changes, and disaster monitorings. The Flying Laptop satellite (Flying Laptop) is the first small satellite developed by the University of Stuttgart (Germany), which is mainly used for research and development projects. The raw data obtained from Flying Laptop is used in the data analysis and data processing, which involve the ground tracks and images analysis. The filtered images are used to formulate Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) plots, which are broadly used for the vegetation monitor in recent years. Due to the weather influences and the available filter in the Flying Laptop imaging payload, the generated NDVI plot needs to be improved in terms of its contrast and the difference in an identification of landcover type for better monitoring purposes. The ground track analysis and image comparison with respect to the fixed ground were used to identify the location of the image being captured and filtered out for unusable images. The formulation of NDVI is repeated with cloud maskings using Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) as references and accordingly normalized the plot in a logarithmic scale. The proposed method of using the cloud masking with references to NDWI improves the contrast of the overall NDVI plots. The usage of automation also helps to improve the efficiency in generating NDVI plots.