ART543 Vertical public space - Regimes of Earth observation
Department of ART - University of Buffalo
Spring 2021; OpenEO updates 2024
Precursor to COCKTAIL - Resource constrained GeoAI
Overview
The vertical-public-space code and reading resource has two purposes. First to foster a critical understanding of the information flows created in the expanding public vertical space (Parks) of Earth-orbiting satellite datasets, and second to build capacity for code-inclusive and design-centric experimentation with these complex assets. The course materials are designed for graduate level non-engineering students with design, architecture and humanities students in mind. As such, the course recasts the technical field of remote sensing as a domain of cultural studies. Here is a list of texts discussed in the course.
While there are numerous other data sources such as Planet and Google Earth, this course works with freely available satellite imagery from the European Space Agency's Sentinel2 program.
This collection of simple functions focuses on end to end band arithmetic that offer complete control of how the imagery is collected and processed, and allows customization any part of the pipeline. Moreover the approach implemented here scales from collecting color images to state-of-the-art machine learning satellite image processing.. No proprietary products are required. Students are encouraged to complement this programming-centric approach with open-source GUI-centric packages such as QGIS. The materials collected here serve as an entry point to more complex GeoAI models introduced in the Cocktail repository.
OpenEO data access
The ESA openEO project makes sentinel-2 satellite datasets more easily accessible. The subscription model includes a free version for experimental use.
The openeo python files included here replace the previous sentinel-2 data access module.
To use the openeo approach, create a virtual environment and then run the script
gdal_install.sh
Run the file openeo_getdata.py with your input parameters to retrieve desired Sentinel-2 datasets.