building an agriculture geocapacity network for the state ...trusted geomatica® brand, pci...

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Challenge

The sustainable development of India’s agriculture is a key economic goal, providing approximately 27% of the country’s gross domestic product. One of the key strategies for sustainable agricultural growth identified by the Indian government is diversifying the crops based on environmental conditions (soil, water, location, and climate) and empowering the agricultural community with sufficient information on crop yields and trends to improve their decision making.

Developing guidelines and practices to support these governmental initiatives requires monitoring the crop growth and the quality of the water and soil. Up-to-date access of geospatial information is imperative to the success of crop diversification over time, and the Indian IRS satellite sensors are the major source of geospatial data used in agricultural applications. Yet extracting the required geo-intelligence from the imagery for agricultural monitoring is currently a large

bottleneck. An additional bottleneck is effectively delivering geo-intelligence to the stakeholders and decision makers. Accurate and well-timed agricultural reports produced by scientists must be distributed to key individuals through effective channels of dissemination. Timely governing on local and national scales is essential for a diversified agricultural development for profitable sustainability.

The challenge faced is to provide sufficient, accurate, and timely geospatial information to the government and to the public. To achieve effective data analysis and information distribution to the masses necessitates an enterprise agriculture monitoring system that supports geospatial data management, automated processing and web dissemination.

The Agriculture GeoCapacity Network (AGCN) for the state of Punjab India is a project initiative between Canada and the state of Punjab to facilitate the Indian agriculture sector to improve their fundamental decision making processes with advanced image-centric enterprise technology. In a partnership between the Punjab Remote Sensing Center, PAU, Info-Electronic Systems (Montreal and New Delhi), the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA Inc), and PCI Geomatics, the AGCN phase I of the project provided a feasibility study, complemented by a Proof of Concept (PoC) to illustrate how information on crop yields and trend analysis can automatically be generated and delivered to government officials and the general public via a simple web browser.

Key Points

Agriculture GeoCapacity Network (AGCN) – to improve decision making in the Indian agriculture sector with advanced image-centric technology

PCI Geomatics’ solution is based on a central data repository, providing automated geospatial data processing workflows and multiple channels for geospatial information to be delivered

The AGCN solution is based on industry standards and an open architecture with the spatially enabled database Oracle

C a s e S t u d y

Building an Agriculture GeoCapacity Network for the State of Punjab, India




In conjunction with Indian experts, the AGCN PoC developed by PCI Geomatics provided an automated way to take complex satellite and geospatial data, and transform it into easily interpreted, deliverable information pertaining to crop, soil, irrigation, pollution and socio-economic factors to assist in agricultural productivity.

Solution

India’s current methodology for calculating yield forecasts relies heavily upon labour-intensive desktop solutions. Currently, all data is ordered, acquired, and processed manually. The geo-correction processes, agriculture modeling and yield and trend analysis use desktop GIS/Remote Sensing applications on a file-based architecture. Their reports are generated externally and printed in a hardcopy format (paper and reports) for distribution.

The disconnect that exists between the data, users, and reports promotes a reliance on human resources, thus adding to the delivery time of critical information and increasing the risk for human error. The current agricultural issues that exist in monitoring and crop yields are:

Difficulty in efficiently and effectively accessing information from the file-based data management system for generating geospatial products and reportsExcessive time spent in interactive processing of satellite imagery, leaving less time for analysis workInsufficient methods and channels for distribution of information are timely and costly when disseminating spatial information to decision makers

For the Proof of Concept, PCI Geomatics relied on an enterprise-level geocapacity information system (GCIS) as the backbone of the AGCN. This system, based on a central data repository, provided automated geospatial data processing workflows and various channels for geospatial information to be delivered. Ultimately, this architecture achieved scalability to accommodate increasing throughput and provided optimal performance when delivering up-to-date geospatial information to the end-user.

Managing and accessing terabytes of geospatial dataMonitoring agricultural sustainability over time involves managing terabytes

of geospatial data. Extracting sufficient and timely information requires regular image acquisition (yearly, monthly, weekly, daily) over large agriculture areas. These images, processed and archived, along with the complementary soil maps, topology, and other various geospatial data can quickly increase the total volume of data to terabytes.

The current data management system in India is file-based. With numerous volumes of imagery continually being collected, the PoC illustrates a leading edge data storage approach by archiving all geospatial data and their derived products, along with metadata and auxiliary information within one spatially enabled database used as a central data repository.


C a s e S t u d yBuilding an Agriculture GeoCapacity Network for the State of Punjab, India


The solution maximizes the Oracle 10g Spatial database by leveraging the security capabilities (data protection, recovery), easy data queries (with support for complex SQL queries), and reduced data redundancy. Oracle further supports structured storage for imagery by using the native pixel data type, GeoRaster. Efficiently storing imagery within the database eliminates file format compatibility issues and supports multiple users simultaneously accessing data online from analysts’ workstations.

Automated process flowsIn order for geospatial data to be useful, it commonly undergoes image pre-processing. Most of these tasks are known to be straightforward, cyclical, and time-consuming. With the current manual processing approach in India, it takes a considerable amount of time to process and prepare terabytes of data for information extraction. The automation of these operations (data ingestion, correction, mosaicking) were in high demand by Indian scientists.

With AGCN, large volumes of data can be systematically processed with automated capabilities that produce quality geospatial information ready for data analysis. At the system’s core, a Job Control System (JCS) is responsible for creating, executing, and monitoring all the automated processing jobs. Multiple workflows can be produced from automated tasks, where the data loading and processing are achieved without human intervention. The processing and analytical tasks which are linked together as jobs into larger workflows are launched automatically. By accessing the JCS, an analyst can initiate various types of automated tasks including the registration and normalization of the remote sensing data, the mosaicking of individual scenes for a specified area of interest, the extraction of NDVI data from the

corrected images and the classification of wheat areas from the imagery.

The system can indicate when a process is complete and specify the location of the results. Automatic wheat yield reports that are generated can be easily consolidated into spatial and descriptive information used for appropriate decision making.

Increase channels for information disseminationIndia’s current workflow is founded on manual, file-based restriction, and service providers can only circulate the geospatial information by paper.

The AGCN system improves data transfer and information dissemination by providing more channels of data distribution. Relying on both the Web and email application, decision makers have immediate access to geo-intelligence derived from crop monitoring. The compilation of reports is generated automatically in common media formats such as paper, email, intranet/internet and a website to the various data analysts, policy makers, and public.

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Benefits

To satisfy India’s agriculture needs, crop information is critical to all stakeholders – including those in farming, market pricing, policy, etc. Early information on yield and production can help plan the type of crops required for farming sustainability. The AGCN solution is based on industry standards and an open architecture leveraging third party technology integration, such as the spatially enabled database Oracle. The system builds upon the known database features such as optimized performance, scalability, security, and integrity. It also exploits the GeoRaster for its structure spatial data storage (raster and vector) within the database. Utilities are provided to import/export various-format spatial data to and from the spatial database, which enhances the ability to utilize data from different sources (e.g. different satellite data).

Since the majority of image processing procedures are automated, they ensure operational accuracy by avoiding user error and saving the analysts a significant amount of pre-processing time. The JCS provides a user control to create, execute, and monitor the fully automated processes (including image registration, image mosaicing, data loading, and map generation). All automated processes are built on advanced image processing algorithms and support features such as cloud removal, normalization, NDVI extraction and supervised image classification. Both thin and thick interfaces enable users to access services through either intranet or internet. The spatial database and relevant image/GIS tools then become

a platform for conducting data analysis for various applications. Results can be disseminated through web, email or paper.

The Proof of Concept demonstrates that the system can be implemented on existing infrastructure investments. The scalability of the system offers a sustainable solution because it can expand services to meet growing demands on a national scale by adding new workflows and delivering additional information products. Depending on throughput requirements, adding multiple processing servers to the hardware architecture will achieve scalability.

Productivity is the final result experienced by the AGCN. The strong return on investment is the production and distribution of critical information used in agricultural decision making. Currently, the Indian methodology takes up to 17 hours to generate and deliver geospatial information to the community. With the automated system developed by PCI Geomatics, the Proof of Concept is able to illustrate that the workflow and report delivery can be completed in less than 6 hours at a 3:1 ratio of improvement.

About PCI Geomatics:Founded in 1982, PCI Geomatics is a world-leading, innovative developer of image-centric software for the geospatial industry. Specializing in remote sensing, digital photogrammetry, spatial analysis, map production and automated production systems, PCI Geomatics’ technology turns images into information. Our geospatial solutions enable our customers to find answers to real-world questions using satellite, aerial and other geospatial data.

From the desktop to the enterprise, our technologies are applied to a wide array of challenges, including natural resource monitoring, homeland security and defense, insurance risk assessment, map production, image management, site selection, feature extraction, and education. With our trusted Geomatica® brand, PCI Geomatics provides the image-centric solutions demanded by a large and expanding industry. With over 21,000 Geomatica licenses in 135 countries, PCI Geomatics is driven to develop leading-edge applications that our customers require to remain productive and competitive.

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