Overview

The Normalized Difference Vegetative Index and Normalized Difference Water Index are indices developed to assess the vegetative health and water content of plants. These indices can be calculated using different wavelengths of light captured high-resolution satellite imagery. The goal of this project is to analyze these indices in the New River Valley using 11 bands of reflected light captured by the Landsat 8 satellite. This research contains machine learning forecasting algorithms and analysis of literature to use these indices in areas such as precision agriculture, groundwater detection, coastal flooding and drought. This project uses raw satellite images taken of the region, constructs filters, indices and subsets of the region by decomposing the wavelengths of light collected in each photograph. These subsets were supplied to a feed-forward neural network to obtain a robust prediction model for the New River valley. 

Teaser Video

Zoom Link

 

Project Website

 

Fellows

Esha Dwibedi 

Virginia Tech, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics 

 

 

 

Avi Seth 

Virginia Tech, Department of Computer Science 

 

 

 

Interns

Atticus Rex 

Virginia Tech, Computational Modeling and Data Analytics 

 

 

 

Victor Mukora 

Virginia Tech, Computational Modeling and Data Analytics 

 

 

 

Mentor

Briana Posadas 

Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education, Virginia Tech