The Hyperview Challenge: Estimating Soil Parameters from Hyperspectral Images

Abstract

Improving agricultural practices through exploiting the recent imaging and machine learning advancements plays a key role nowadays to ensure sustainable food security, and to help us deal with the climate change. Quantifying soil parameters can lead to optimizing the fertilization process but it is cumbersome, time-consuming and difficult to scale, as it requires performing in-situ soil measurements that are later analyzed in the laboratory settings. In the HYPER-VIEW challenge, we aim at automating the soil analysis thanks to the utilization of hyperspectral images that capture very detailed information about the scanned objects in hundreds of contiguous hyperspectral bands. Such imagery can be effectively analyzed using an array of classical and deep machine learning approaches. Also, the AI techniques can be deployed on-board the imaging satellites— it opens new doors related to the scalability of the solution. The winners of the challenge will be offered a unique opportunity to run their proposed solution in orbit, on-board the Intuition-1 satellite, equipped with a hyperspectral imager and on-board AI capabilities.