Objectives of the Product

Make a list of six Sentinel-1 analysis ready data (ARD) products very easy to use for both human visual and machine-readable form. The ideal is either one click or one API command integration and use. Make the most of Sentinel-1 input data with state-of-the-art calibration, thermal-noise removal, and speckle suppression. The S1 ARD products are targeted for several governmental and business users to help them in certain use cases as a useful input for analysis or to provide an end-user service.

---

Customers and their Needs

Customers:
1) EO, ICT and GIS companies as service providers for a various end-user services
2) governmental users
3) farm management software (FMS) providers

Needs:
1) Need to integrate and use satellite imagery quick and easy
2) The models serving an end-user require well-calibrated and high-quality SAR data
3) End-users require frequent updates about their AOIs
4) End-users require imagery with high spatial resolution

---

Targeted customer/users countries

European, American, and Asian countries.

---

Product description

Sentinel-1 Analysis Ready Data (ARD) layers:
1. Time series of parcel-level statistics of VH and VV backscatter, VH/VV backscatter ratio, VH and VV 6-day repeat pass coherence (parcel min, max, mean, median, standard deviation)
2. Calibrated high-resolution VH and VV coherence rasters
3. Calibrated high-resolution VH and VV backscatter and VH/VV ratio rasters
4. Multi-polarisation backscatter image for visual use as a WMS service
5. Synthetic Sentinel-2-like natural colours image based on Sentinel-1 data, using modern AI-modelling tools
6. Synthetic NDVI-like raster based on Sentinel-1 and -2 time series with AI-modelling

Easy to use ideal is to make satellite image accessible with one click or one API command (e.g. switch on the satellite WMS/WCS layer in your web/desktop GIS and data mining, machine learning frameworks). All the data layers will have state-of-the-art calibration, thermal noise removal and speckle suppression.

---

Added Value

The pre-processing burden of SAR data is taken away. A lot of EO, GIS and ICT companies and government institutions are not SAR experts, but they would benefit a lot from SAR data if it were provided in analysis ready format.

---

Current Status

KappaOne has three interactive demo environments deployed, where users can observe fresh and historical Sentinel-1 data layers together with parcel statistics and synthetic NDVI: https://map.kappaone.eu/ard_demo/ for Germany, https://map.kappaone.eu/ard_ee/ for Estonia and https://map.kappaone.eu/ard_sndvi_demo for synthetic NDVI index. Provided raster images illustrate KappaZeta’s vision of high-quality, high-resolution Sentinel-1 images, that are processed to be useable for visual interpretation as well as for machine learning input. Visual interpretation is helped by highest reasonable resolution, 5m grid cell, state of the art speckle filtering method “Refined Lee”, careful contrast enhancement and a selection of composite images. As an advanced feature, temporal averaging can be selected to show cleaner, more detailed images. Despite all the efforts, direct interpretation of Sentinel-1 images is still challenging for non-trivial cases, so we also provide a synthesis of Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 images, which can provide NDVI like vegetation index for cloudy days. As a third product, we can deliver parcel-based time-series of Sentinel-1 data, which uses a special parcel level noise reduction mechanism and is able to give better signal-noise ratio that simple polygon extraction from the raster.

All these products can be ordered via an API, which allows registered users to define new areas of interest, time period, list of parameters, set up a web map, generate download links, etc.