Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Normalized difference vegetation index
Summary
The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is a widely-used metric for quantifying the health and density of vegetation using sensor data. It is calculated from spectrometric data at two specific bands: red and near-infrared. The spectrometric data is usually sourced from remote sensors, such as satellites.
The metric is popular in industry because of its accuracy. It has a high correlation with the true state of vegetation on the ground. The index is easy to interpret: NDVI will be a value between -1 and 1. An area with nothing growing in it will have an NDVI of zero. NDVI will increase in proportion to vegetation growth. An area with dense, healthy vegetation will have an NDVI of one. NDVI values less than 0 suggest a lack of dry land. An ocean will yield an NDVI of -1.
The exploration of outer space started in earnest with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. This was the first man-made satellite orbiting the Earth. Subsequent successful launches, both in the Soviet Union (e.g., the Sputnik and Cosmos programs), and in the U.S. (e.g., the Explorer program), quickly led to the design and operation of dedicated meteorological satellites. These are orbiting platforms embarking instruments specially designed to observe the Earth's atmosphere and surface with a view to improve weather forecasting. Starting in 1960, the TIROS series of satellites embarked television cameras and radiometers. This was later (1964 onwards) followed by the Nimbus satellites and the family of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) platforms. The latter measures the reflectance of the planet in red and near-infrared bands, as well as in the thermal infrared. In parallel, NASA developed the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), which became the precursor to the Landsat program. These early sensors had minimal spectral resolution, but tended to include bands in the red and near-infrared, which are useful to distinguish vegetation and clouds, amongst other targets.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.