An operational approach to monitor vegetation using remote sensing

This paper addresses vegetation monitoring in European agricultural areas using Earth Observation satellites. Due to the small size of typical European fields, two complementary sensors are used, SPOT and NOAA-AVHRR, bringing the spatial and the temporal information respectively. A sub-pixel analysis of NOAA data using one SPOT image is performed to characterize fields with high spatial and temporal resolutions. To be used in an operational context, the method must have realistic data requirements. We define an operational scenario making use of only one SPOT image per site and a one year NOAA sequence, covering a large part of Europe. We first proceed to an unsupervised segmentation of the SPOT image; the NOAA data analysis on test sites provides the temporal evolution of vegetation; then, identification of fields is performed by minimizing a cost function measuring the similarity between the global reflectance observed on NOAA pixels and the reflectance computed from corresponding regions at SPOT resolution