KEDR: Forest satellite monitoring system

In the Far East of Russia, on the initiative of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Russia, with the support of the Ministry of the development of the Far East and the office of the Plenipotentiary representative of the President of the Russian Federation, the advanced system of forest satellite monitoring "KEDR", unique not only for Russia but also for the entire world community, is being actively implemented in the Far East. This system makes it possible to detect illegal logging in cedar-broadleaved forests. It is based on algorithms of automatic analysis of satellite images of average resolution for the vegetative and snow period, which are received online at the operation control station.

The algorithm of the "KEDR" system is based on the automated pixel-by-pixel comparison of multi-temporal images of average resolution, which are publicly available. The algorithm of the system "KEDR" not only compares two consecutive images, but, first of all, forms combined set of all images available for the area, and creates a data sets with different statistical values of the chromaticity and its deviations from the median values for each site/pixel. And finally the second step is to compare the data sets with the statistically processed operational snapshot. This allows system to remove the "noise" in the automatic comparison of images and significantly improves the accuracy of fixing changes. It is worth noting that the system "KEDR" is used to analyze the data of one system, but uses different algorithms that take into account different criteria for the growing season and snow (leafless) period.