Quality sustaining vegetation index for natural resources monitoring using satellite images

Nowadays, natural resource monitoring represents an actual and challenging research topic in the context of the new climate neutrality strategies. In this paper, we design a composite index for assessing natural resources such as lands that can sustain vegetation. We also implement a cloud computing solution based on the microservice architecture that allows the monitoring of natural resources such as water, soil, and vegetation using satellite products provided by SentinelHub. The images are processed to obtain NDWI (Normalized Difference Water), BSI (Bare Soil), NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation), and NDMI (Normalized Difference Moisture) index values. Furthermore, we compute the quality composite index for the specified area based on the previously mentioned indexes. Moreover, comparisons can be made between various years chosen by the user. The solution can be deployed in a Cloud Computing environment, is scalable due to multiple replicas of the used services, reliable due to the cache service that saves already processed indexes in a database, reducing the dependency on SentinelHub, and is secure due to various protection measures against SQL and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.