Illisys V2: A Solution
dedicated to the monitoring of Illicit Crops Laurent
Bascle Project Manager, Spot Image, France Tel.: +33 (0)5 62 19 40 96, Fax: +33 (0)5 62 19 43 43, Email: laurent.bascle@spotimage.fr Françoise Font GIS consultant, SIGbea, France Tel.: +33 (0)2 38 86 59 36, Fax: +33 (0)2 38 86 21 57, Email: ffont@sigbea.fr ABSTRACT: Spot Image has more than 10 years word wide experience in the monitoring of illicit crop with satellite imagery acquired through projects with national authorities and international organisations like the UN. From this experience, Spot Image has realised that despite local specificities, countries with illicit crop cultivation face the same problems of inventory and monitoring. The company has designed a package which includes the provision of a customisable software, Illisys, for analysing satellite images with ground observations, high resolution SPOT images and training with technical assistance in order to assure a complete transfer of technology. The Spot Image current project in Thailand is located at ONCB (Office of the Narcotics Control Board) which has a tremendous and effective experience in poppy monitoring and eradication in the northern highland territories. This project aims to set up a Regional Training Centre in Chiang Mai dedicated to the monitoring of illicit crops using satellite imagery. A training room has been installed in ONCB Northern Branch premises, with workstations all equipped with a customised Illisys and the reference database of Thailand. This version developed to fit ONCB needs, integrates standard photo-interpretation and GIS functions and specific cartographic and field work tools. It has also been loaded on the project tablet PC to record poppy fields location in real time with a GPS while conducting field work. The future lecturers of ONCB have been trained in France and Thailand. They have received all pedagogic documents needed to carry out an Illisys training program as well as SPOT-5 high resolution images of poppy cultivation areas to be used in the tutorials and case studies. The operational side of Spot Image monitoring package will be demonstrated at ONCB where Illisys and SPOT data are expected to be used in the poppy survey methodology for the next campaigns. 1. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SPOT IMAGE ILLICIT CROP MONITORING PACKAGE 1.1 Presentation of Spot Image general activities and know-how Spot Image is a French commercial company in charge of multi-source satellite image diffusion worldwide, i.e. SPOT data as well as radar and optical data acquired from other satellite systems. As far as SPOT data are concerned, the network of direct receiving stations which is expanding since the creation of the company in 1987 allows to cover most part of the world. Spot Image also designs and offers satellite image derived products and services in a wide variety of application fields, such as agriculture and forestry, urban planning, cadastre, environmental assessment and monitoring, defence. More specifically, since 1990, Spot Image has developed a successful and intensive project activity which allows to demonstrate the SPOT technology capacity and to fulfil the needs for integrated solutions, i.e. adequate satellite data acquisition, thematic data extraction, software and hardware provision, complete transfer of technology through training and technical assistance. Year after year, the company has gradually built an end-to-end range of skills in terms of satellite image application project, which starts from project design with in-depth need analysis and feasibility study, funding and partnership set up, to project management with provision of appropriate data and data processing system, training and technical support. Moreover, with the two main shareholders, CNES (French National Space Centre) and EADS Astrium (European Satellite Company) , Spot Image benefits from a very diversified and strong distribution network, cooperation with several service companies in Europe and around the world and a very skilled team of experts. In this favourable context, Spot Image is designing turnkey solutions which not only encompass satellite data acquisition but also include adapted equipment for data processing and technical support. The particularity of these application packages is that they are adaptable to a certain extent according to the customer needs and constraints. In the case of agriculture, where satellite data are expected to be acquired and delivered on time, Spot Image has already developed a very cost effective data production service, which allows to guarantee the customer with the supply of good quality data on the required site. This can be illustrated with the precision farming programme of EADS Astrium in Europe, FarmstarÒ, for which Spot Image supplies SPOT data of individual fields acquired at very specific times of the year for estimating crop fertilisers needs or crop potential yield. In other fields of agriculture such as agricultural statistics, agricultural production management and agri-environmental monitoring, there is a need for more comprehensive services with supply of data but also of appropriate data processing software and methodology. This is also the case of illicit crop monitoring. 1.2 Spot Image experience in illicit crop monitoring projects Illicit crop monitoring with satellite imagery has been a subject of interest at Spot Image for more than 12 years. Illicit crops mainly refer to coca bush, opium poppy and cannabis cultivation. The most significant experience of the company in this field have been the projects conducted in Colombia and Thailand at a national level and the feasibility study carried out with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the United Nations for Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) in 1999 – 2000 at a global scale. In the early 90’s, Spot Image with two French partners, IGN, the National Geographic Institute and Matra, the Space Industrial company, equipped and trained the organism in charge of opium poppy survey in Thailand, ONCB (Office for National Drug Control). Since then, ONCB has developed a methodology based on satellite images and aerial reconnaissance survey which is used every year to map opium poppy fields and produce national statistics. In the late 90’s, Spot Image with the French government equipped and trained the police administrative unit in charge of coca bush monitoring and eradication in Colombia, which remains the first cocaine producing country in the world. SPOT data were used to map coca bush plantations which could be clearly detected from the surrounding primary rainforest. A specific GIS software, Illisys v1, was developed by Spot Image in order to help the police to build a geographic database, quickly produce good quality maps and integrate automatically GPS data such as the fumigation tracks. Indeed, in Colombia, aerial herbicides spraying is conducted each year for eradicating coca bush cultivation. The airplanes are equipped with a GPS system connected to the sprayer in order to record the actual tracks over coca plantations. Boosted by these experiences, Spot Image could bring tangible elements to the ESA-UNDCP study which aimed to assess the usefulness of satellite image technology coupled with GIS for mapping and monitoring illicit crops in the main producing countries, i.e. Afghanistan, Myanmar, Lao PDR for opium production and Colombia, Bolivia and Peru for cocaine production (UNODC, 2004). More specifically, the objective was to evaluate the possibility to set up an homogeneous methodology for all these countries which would allow to locate illicit cultivation sites every year and estimate the surface area and yield in a reliable, coherent and accurate way. The study showed the many facets of illicit crop cultivation and the various strategies developed by each country in the attempt to monitor and sometime eradicate the illicit crop. In the same country and for the same illicit crop, there is no one but many cultivation patterns which vary according to crop cycle (i.e. sowing and harvest dates), farming practices (i.e. use of fertilisers, plant density and crop association for example), geographic location, production level (i.e. intensive or extensive cultivation). In general, intensive eradication campaigns bring changes in illicit crop cultivation which tends to be more diversified and distributed in remote and inaccessible areas. However, the study demonstrated that all countries faced the same lack: a system which would allow a complete, objective and reliable annual inventory of crops, an annual monitoring with change detection analysis in the crop location and crop surface area, the reduction of ground field work which usually weighs heavily on the budget, the planning of drug control programmes (i.e. alternative development and eradication operations) and the production of statistics at various levels (i.e. local administrative unit level, national level). In this context and compared to aerial and ground survey, the usefulness, cost effectiveness and operational side of satellite images was fully demonstrated. In particular, SPOT data provide homogeneous information in space and time allowing reliable comparison and thus reliable monitoring assessment, cover vast territories at specific period of time thanks to programming capacity of SPOT satellites, provide an accurate cartographic reference system allowing precise surface estimation and crop location, provide as well a complete, high quality and up-to-date picture of the illicit crop cultivation landscape which facilitates navigation and interpretation while conducting field work and can also be used as background information when presenting map results. However, because of the diversity of cultivation patterns, the detection of illicit crop fields on satellite image strongly depends on the level of ground expertise, even with the new generation of satellite data, such as SPOT-5 images which can provide multispectral information at a ground resolution of 2.5 m. Therefore, the study also recommended the development of a dedicated GIS software solution which would allow to use satellite image with ground observations in order to map illicit crop fields and to estimate changes in surface area and location from one year to the next. Despite the fact that the present Illicit Crop Monitoring Programme of UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) has not invested in Remote Sensing and GIS technology for all targeted countries, Spot Image has pursued its efforts in the same direction as the 1999 appraisal in designing a dedicated package and upgrading the monitoring system of Colombia in 2000 and Thailand in 2003 – 2004. 2. THE SPOT IMAGE PACKAGE FOR MONITORING ILLICIT CROPS The Spot Image package for monitoring illicit crops is centred around the development of a comprehensive and customisable GIS software solution dedicated to the detection, mapping and monitoring of illicit crops, called ILLISYS v2. It includes then the provision of muti-satellite data in order to guaranty satellite resources in countries where the cloud cover is frequent through the year and the complete transfer of technology with specific training and technical support. Spot Image can also advise the customer on the most adequate hardware equipment to purchase in order to run ILLISYS at the office as well as in the field. 2.1 A software dedicated to illicit crop monitoring: ILLISYS v2 ILLISYS v2 results from an industrial development approach supported by a qualified development process and strong industrial partnership. It has been developed in 2000 on the basis of technical specifications originated from the ESA-UNDCP appraisal results in particular and maintained since then. ILLISYS v2 is based on the French GIS engine GEOCONCEPT and associated modules such as GEOTERRA for image processing and runs on Windows platform. The core of the ILLISYS system is based on satellite image photo-interpretation, which has proven to be the most efficient and reliable method for mapping illicit crop fields and assessing changes. Indeed, automatic recognition of crops is hazardous taking into account the diversified cultivation patterns as explained above. Satellite images are easily integrated by the software which can handle various types of satellite sensors as well as geometrically rectified aerial photographs. They can be visually enhanced in order to detect illicit crop fields better. Ground observation data are also easily imported into the system in order to help the photo-interpretation. Then, a complete set of standard GIS functions allows to efficiently capture or digitise on screen each individual field and associated descriptive information, building progressively a whole geographic database. Data produced can be analysed geographically or thematically through classic query process and the software offers standard tools for mapping, computing simple statistics and exporting results towards other commercial GIS or spreadsheet software. The particularity of ILLISYS v2 is then the original software architecture which offers a low cost and secured data sharing solution, allowing to work at national scales with multiple users and avoiding the implementation of heavy and expensive « geographic data server » solutions by using network resources in a limited way. Geographic data on illicit crop are secured and centrally stored in a unique GEOCONCEPT database localised in a workstation designated as « server ». Data sharing and access conflict management are performed via the management of Working zones, which allow to divide the whole study area into smaller geographic areas and assign specific tasks to each of them, avoiding gaps or overlaps in the photo-interpretation work. The coordination between various ILLISYS users is then implemented through the definition of two user profiles. The ILLISYS Administrator is in charge of external observation data integration (e.g. satellite images, digital photos), definition of Working zones and assignation to operators. The ILLISYS Operator is in charge of illicit crop field digitisation and association with various formats of information (e.g. reports, photos, tables), map edition and aerial and/or ground field survey. Another strong point of ILLISYS v2 is that it can be installed on a lab top or tablet PC with GPS connection for collecting localisable field data from the ground or from an helicopter or airplane, such as the path or route followed by the vehicle, the areas of illicit cultivation or outstanding landscape features. This is the disconnected mode. When reconnecting the field work tool to the network at the office, a synchronization process with the main database allows to reintegrate the ground and/or air survey data easily and directly. Finally, ILLISYS v2 has been designed as a production tool, which means that it should contain the strictly necessary functions for mapping and monitoring and a database structure compatible with each country needs and specificities. For example, the administrative division or the way of describing general landscape features as roads or rivers vary from one country to another. Beside the information on illicit crop fields themselves, some countries can also record specific data such as the fumigation tracks in Colombia previously mentioned. Each country has finally its own specificities in terms of cartographic reference systems which must be implemented in ILLISYS in order to make sure that any data produced by the software will be geometrically compatible with any other type of geographic data. Adaptation or customisation of the software is then a compulsory step and is implemented in close collaboration with the future ILLISYS user. Moreover, on customer request, specific tools can also be developed and added to the standard ILLISYS menus. 2.2 Need analysis Any project based on ILLISYS V2 will start with an in-depth need analysis, in order to precisely define the database structure to be implemented in the software, the projection system to be used, the quality of geographic data provided by the customer and to be integrated into the system, the specific functions to be developed and added if necessary. A complete inventory of existing human and computer resources will also be performed at this preliminary stage in order to give recommendations in terms of complementary hardware acquisition, human organisation and training. 2.3 Provision of satellite images Beside the customisation of the ILLISYS v2 software, the Spot Image package includes the provision of adequate satellite data, in terms of geographic location, dates of acquisition, geometric resolution and level of geometric correction. It is quite common that permanent cloud cover and programming conflicts decreases the probability to acquire good quality data at one particular time in one particular site. Therefore, multi-source satellite data provision is never neglected. However, when possible, the acquisition of Spot-5 data is particularly interesting in the illicit crop mapping context, as they provide a good quality cartographic reference system. The merging of the panchromatic and multispectral modes gives colour image products at 2.5 m. ground resolution. The particular HRS (High Resolution Stereoscopy) instrument on board SPOT-5 satellite allows to produce ortho-rectified SPOT images with a precision of less than 15 m. without ground control points, which is particularly useful for countries where illicit cultivation mainly takes place in mountainous areas and which do not have good quality topographic maps. 2.4 Training and technical assistance Finally, the last component of the Spot Image package for illicit crop monitoring refers to training and technical assistance activities. Even if ILLISYS v2 is an easy to use software, its particular architecture implies that the customer perfectly understands how to organise human resources in the most optimal way in order to use the software as best as possible. Consultants in charge of the training and technical support have been involved in Spot Image ILLISYS projects since the beginning and can bring their expertise in the field of Remote Sensing, GIS, computing and ILLISYS. The field expertise remains in the customer hands. Training, which is 2 to 3 weeks long, is usually a first step in the software handling. Practice and organisation issues can only be approached through a series of technical assistance missions on site. 3. THE CASE OF ONCB IN THAILAND 3.1 The present opium poppy monitoring methodology in Thailand In Thailand, the intensification of eradication campaigns of the last years has dramatically reduced the extent of opium poppy cultivation which is less than 200 ha for the whole country nowadays. One of the consequences is that new farming practices such as diversified crop cycles in the same year, use of fertilisers, association with other crops, have appeared and poppy fields tend to be located in more and more isolated mountainous areas. This situation makes the opium poppy survey and eradication campaigns more and more difficult to perform. The unit in charge of poppy survey at ONCB (Office for Narcotic Control Board) Chiang Mai has been using satellite images for more than 15 years. Each year, satellite images are acquired for the 76 areas of potential cultivation in North Thailand, also called Highland Units. Satellite image maps are produced and photo-interpreted after systematic aerial reconnaissance survey. Maps of poppy fields for each highland unit are then given to the Royal Thai Army and Police units for eradication operations. Statistics of opium poppy cultivation and eradication are produced each year. This system has proven to be efficient and now that the opium production level is quite low, the ONCB survey unit tends to diversify its activities, in particular around training. In this context, the objective of Spot Image current project at ONCB is double: setting up a regional training centre and help ONCB to improve the quality and the productivity of present survey methodology taking into account the new opium poppy cultivation landscape in Thailand. 3.2 Setting up a Regional Training Centre for illicit crop monitoring The Spot Image project has allowed to install a training room in ONCB Northern Branch premises, with office workstations all equipped with a customised version of ILLISYS v2 for Thailand. It has also provided a tablet PC which, connected to ONCB GPS systems, allows to show how to record poppy fields location and helicopter tracks when performing aerial reconnaissance survey. The future lecturers of ONCB have been trained in France (2 weeks) and Thailand (3 weeks). Three technical assistance missions have allowed to consolidate the ONCB staff ILLISYS knowledge and to set up case studies for the future ILLISYS training sessions of the Regional Centre. The ONCB staff has received the necessary pedagogic documents to carry out an ILLISYS training program as well as SPOT-5 high resolution images (panchromatic and multispectral) of poppy cultivation areas to be used in the tutorials and case studies. ONCB expects to train people from the neighbouring countries which face similar illicit crop cultivation problems but do not use any Remote Sensing / GIS package for monitoring. 3.3 Usefulness of the ILLISYS v2 Spot Image package at ONCB During the last technical assistance, ILLISYS v2 has also been installed in the workstations used for opium poppy survey at ONCB. Indeed, the ONCB survey unit uses various image processing and GIS software for producing satellite image maps, delineating individual field boundaries and build a poppy field geographic database. ILLISYS v2 along with SPOT 5 images will be tested for the new campaign as they should improve the photo-interpretation work, decrease processing times, improve the quality of the final database in geometric and thematic terms, improve and facilitate field work with the tablet PC. This first use of ILLISYS should enhance the future training sessions at ONCB with operational and concrete experience. References
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