Intuition-1: Toward In-Orbit Bare Soil Detection Using Spectral Vegetation Indices

Bare soil detection is an important step in soil composition analysis, as it can prune the areas that should be excluded from more expensive processing aimed at extracting selected soil parameters from hyperspectral images acquired in orbit. This is of paramount importance for on-board applications, where hardware constraints of an edge device (a satellite), such as computational and memory requirements or energy consumption need to be considered while processing big data in space. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective bare soil detection algorithm exploiting vegetation indices that is ready for in-orbit deployment. Our experimental study performed over the airborne hyperspectral data shows that this approach can be robustly used for simulated bands, i.e., wide bands aggregating several narrow neighboring bands within the spectrum. Therefore, we can apply our technique to sensors with lower spectral resolution. Finally, it offers high-quality bare soil delineation reaching the Dice Index of 0.85.