Abstract

Utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, has increased explosively during the past couple of years. Integrating analytics and actuation either utilizing individual drones, drone teams or drone swarms will enable robotization of various environmental operations in the future. This presentation focuses on drone based remote sensing in agricultural and forestry applications. Drones become intelligent when coupled with sensors and analytics. Imaging sensors (color, hyperspectral and multispectral cameras) enable exploration of objects’ 3D structure, and reflection and absorption characteristics. Essential data preprocessing steps are georeferencing, 3D object reconstruction and radiometric calibration. Machine learning plays a fundamental role in building the analytics process. The physical observations measured in field or in laboratory are related to the remote sensing observations and models are built to extract information. Then in analytics applications remote sensing data are fed to the analyzer and the information are extracted utilizing the models. This presentation deals with remote sensing sensor, data calibration and machine learning and presents selected case studies in forest inventory, tree health analysis and grass quality and quantity assessment.

Bio

Dr. Eija Honkavaara is Research Manager at the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute in the National Land Survey (FGI) and Docent at the Aalto University in the field of Automatic Systems in Photogrammetry. Her current research focuses on drone based geoinformation and AI technologies for environmental remote sensing. The DroneFinland-team led by Dr Honkavaara has developed several generations of high-performance drone remote sensing systems with cameras, hyperspectral sensors, analytics applications as well as inhouse data processing chains. She has a wide international research network, is a leader of working group “Hyperspectral Imaging Applications” in the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and has led several national and international projects on UAV remote sensing.

Machine Learning Coffee seminars are weekly seminars organized by Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI) and are held jointly by the Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. The seminars aim to gather people from different fields of science with interest in machine learning. Seminars will be held weekly on Mondays at 9:00-10:00. The location alternates between Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. At Aalto University, talks will be held in Konemiehentie 2, seminar room T5 and at the University of Helsinki in Kumpula, seminar room Exactum D122 (Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2b), unless otherwise noted. Talks will begin at 9:15 and coffee will be served from 9:00.