1. European Union Satellite Centre © 2020
Final BETTER Hackathon
SAR-based change detection:
enhanced analysis and postprocessing
RTDI Unit – Capability Development Division

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Outline
PLEASE INTERACT WITH THE CHALLENGE PROMOTER !
https://meet.google.com/bma-jqsp-axz
- BETTER Project and the GEOINT challenges
- Tour de Table
- Introduction to the coding environment
- Exercises
- Explanation of the task
- Steps to perform it
- Review and Open discussion

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SatCen RTDI Unit
“Supporting the decision making and actions
of the EU in the field of the Common Foreign
and Security Policy by providing products
and services resulting from the exploitation
of relevant space assets and collateral data”
The SatCen Research, Technology Development
and Innovation Unit is implementing new
operational solutions looking at the whole EO
and collateral data lifecycle:
• New Data Acquisition Systems (e.g.
HAPS)
• Secure SatCom (e.g. EU GovSatCom)
• Innovative Technologies (e.g. Big Data,
AI)
• EO Based Applications (e.g. SAR CD)
• Cooperation (e.g. ESA, GEO, H2020)

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BETTER Project
 BETTER (Big-data Earth observation Technology
and Tools Enhancing Research and development)
H2020 project (November 2017 - January 2021)
 Implement a EO Big Data intermediate service layer devoted to harnessing the
potential of the Sentinel European EO data directly from the needs of the
users.
 BETTER developments will be driven by a large number of Big Data Challenges
to be set forward by the users deeply involved in addressing the Key Societal
Challenges.
 During the project each promoter (3) introduced 9 challenges, 3 in each
project year, with an additional nine brought by the “Extending the market”
task, in a total of 36 challenges.
This project has received funding from the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation
Programme under grant agreement no 776280

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Challenge
• Extremely large and complex datasets
• SatCen aims to enhance the capabilities of the
Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) community
in the Space and Security domain through the
provision of improved EO products and
applications exploiting Big Data methods and
techniques
Solution - BETTER
• Facilitate the usage of large volume and
heterogeneous datasets. Users can focus on
the analysis of the extraction of the potential
knowledge within the data and not on the
processing of the data itself
• BETTER is improving the way Big Data service
developers interact with end-users.
SatCen in BETTER

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SatCen Challenges
- Change Detection and Characterization 1 (SAR Change Detection with SLC
data)
- Thematic Indexes 1 (water and vegetation indexes with Optical data)
- Land Use / Land Cover 1 (Illicit Crop Monitoring)
- Change Detection and Characterization 2 (SAR Change Detection with
GRD data)
- Thematic Indexes 2 (mineral indexes with Optical data)
- Land Use/Land Cover (Illegal deforestation)
- Change Detection and Characterization 3 (CCD with Sentinel-1 SLC IW
data)
- Thematic Indexes 3 (Thermal​ ​Indexes​ ​e.g.​ ​identify​ ​temperature​ ​variations)
- Land Use/Land Cover 3 (burned area identification)

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• Traditional practices in GEOINT are based essentially on visual
interpretation of Very High Resolution (VHR) images
• S1 can provide a valuable support:
 High revisiting time regardless of weather conditions
 Advantageous monitoring capability for wide areas
 Free, full and open data policy for Copernicus programme
Sentinel-1
Once a phenomenon of interest is
highlighted with Sentinels, VHR
images are collected to
complement the information
initially obtained

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Change Detection
Google image – 27/02/2018 Google image – 30/05/2018
RGB: Jan18-Jun18 RGB: Jun18-Sep18

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Time Series

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• For participants
• Discover BETTER in an interactive way
• Learn about S1 image processing and change detection
• Share knowledge with other participants and organizers
• For BETTER
• Enable the use of specific solutions in other areas and the
collection of additional user feedback
• Increase awareness on the infrastructure and the project
itself
• For SatCen
• Share knowledge with other users (new points of view, new
ideas…)
Importance of the hackathon

11. European Union Satellite Centre © 2020
RTDI Unit – Capability
Development Division
rtdi@satcen.europa.eu
Thanks!
Let’s start coding!
https://github.com/ec-better/hackathon-2020-satcen