Optical Satellite Images Services for Precision Agricultural use: A Review

Abstract

The recent advances in geoscience technologies and earth observation tools have evolved in recent years in a fast cadence. Since 1980 with the apparition of Landsat mission firstly named the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, with 80 m spatial resolution; the ability to capture finest details was limited. The emergence of new concepts in agriculture like digital agriculture and precision agriculture (PA) was challenging the capacity of satellite images to capture the variation within the field. The domain that was firstly more dedicated to aerial and handheld remote sensing is now accessible to satellite remote sensing thanks to recent advancements that had provided more satisfactory spatial resolution reaching 0.3 m in a daily revisit frequency. Different providers have launched commercial, very high-resolution nanosatellite constellations to respond to more precise needs, and increasing the availability of remotely sensed images expands the horizon of our choices of imagery sources. The present work intends to compare spatial, temporal, spectral, and radiometric resolution, considering the farmer's requirements and precision agriculture application's requirements nowadays available and the future generation satellite missions, and benchmark the major satellite images providers. It exposes the characteristics and future missions to facilitate adequate choice. The criterion of selecting the appropriate sensors among the considerable amount of providers was limited to optical data, with less than 10 m spatial resolution and frequent revisit time. The offer of imagery is majorly commercial missions; the available open and accessible alternative is limited in the sentinel mission with 10 m spatial resolution.