A claimed world-first service that could revolutionise the way satellite imagery is used in precision agriculture has been announced by UK technology companies Origin Digital and Aspia Space.
ClearSky feeds radar data into a deep neural network to derive the view of a field that a satellite would see if there were no clouds blocking its camera. The innovation means that farmers using the system are guaranteed to receive an image every six days showing them how their crop is developing, whatever the weather. This is in contrast to traditional, weather-dependent imagery that can often have gaps of several weeks between cloud-free views.
The head of data at Origin Digital, Madhumita Mund Rao, said this was a hugely exciting development because it added the dependable regularity that was missing in traditional imagery services.
“This reliability will give UK farmers a substantial new advantage in sustainably optimising their yield and input use,” she added. “At any given time, an average of 67 per cent of the Earth is covered by clouds, so precision agriculture systems that rely on getting clear satellite imagery at the right time have historically struggled to deliver on their high potential value.
“ClearSky eliminates that struggle by guaranteeing the consistent regularity these systems need to deliver results, enabling farmers to fully optimise their fertiliser use, for example, and helping both their wallets and the planet.”
Analysis by Origin Digital shows that the widely used European Space Agency Sentinel 2 satellites produced 13 clear images per UK farm on average in 2021. In contrast, the ClearSky technology developed by Aspia Space uses revolutionary techniques to produce more than 60 cloud-free images per year that can be used alongside the clear images captured by Sentinel 2 and other providers.
“Our technology unlocks Earth observation imaging data and intelligence that would have otherwise been lost,” Aspia Space co-founder Professor Jim Geach said. “ClearSky uses radar inputs, that penetrate cloud but are challenging to interpret, to derive imagery across the visible and short wave infrared spectrum. This means that even in the presence of 100 per cent cloud cover, we can deliver regular, reliable, and consistent cloud-free images that are easily understood and can be analysed in exactly the same way as regular optical imagery.
“ClearSky was developed using the idea that the way radio and microwaves behave when they hit surface features – such as crops – is correlated, albeit in a highly complex way, with the way that optical light waves interact with those same features,” he added. “Using artificial intelligence (AI) to unpick this correlation means that ClearSky can predict cloud-free imagery with no optical inputs without a loss of accuracy over long periods of time without clear optical images. That makes it a true game-changer.”
Following the UK launch, Origin Digital and Aspia Space are deepening their collaboration to localise and export the benefits of ClearSky to farmers around the world, as well as developing further potential applications that bring innovative data insights to UK agriculture.
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