Sentinel-2 imagery: pre-processing, applications and algorithms

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GEO University Learning Content

3 min readJun 24, 2018

Day by day, loads of datasets are added in the Earth Observation imagery archive, introducing more opportunities and higher potential in the resilience and adaptability of the remote sensing domain. One of the operations contributing in this action is the SENTINEL program on behalf of the joint ESA and European Commission initiative GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security).

Currently, four missions of the SENTINEL program are operational:

Sentinel-1, a radar imaging mission for land and ocean services
Sentinel-2, a multispectral high-resolution imaging mission for land monitoring
Sentinel-3, a multi-instrument mission for marine applications
Sentinel-5P (Sentinel-5 Precursor), for atmospheric, air quality and climate services.

In this article, we will focus on the Sentinel-2 mission.

For those that have already worked with the Sentinel-2 imagery, they will be aware of the ESA’s Sentinel Application Platform, or most commonly, the SNAP software. It is freely available from here: http://step.esa.int/main/download/

SNAP offers a full series of toolboxes oriented in the Sentinel missions. The integration of these toolboxes on one platform makes the pre-processing and the algorithm implementation and analysis on the Sentinel imagery easier and more adaptive to the selected application.

GEO University provides a course that is dedicated on the Sentinel-2 processing for some of the most common remote sensing applications, called:

‘Multispectral Earth Observation Applications using ESA Sentinel Application Platform’

During this course, you will learn how to process ESA’s COPERNICUS Sentinel-2 data using SNAP software. The objective of the course is to make the student capable of creating optical-based Earth Observation Applications. To be more precise, the main applications examined are the following:

Vegetation Mapping
Burn Area Mapping
Chlorophyll Mapping
Supervised Land Cover Classification

The Graph Builder module is used extensively during the course in order to create workflows.

Example XML workflow files are provided within the course to better help students practice at their own computers!

Example Sentinel-2 images are also included in the course, so you can test the contents of course presented directly to your computer!

By the completion of the course there is also a blockchain based digital certificate to better prove your skills! Best part? It comes with price of the course, no hidden costs. Just enroll to the course, successfully finish all lessons, and claim your certificate.