Agriculture & Food

Healthy plants strongly absorb blue and red light and strongly reflect NIR light. NIR light has optical wavelengths beyond our human vision but is still visible to multispectral cameras. By detecting the light reflected by plants, Torrent's multispectral imagers can differentiate healthy plants from unhealthy or stressed plants before our eyes or a color camera can.

Scientists and agronomists have been using satellite multispectral data for decades – using vegetation indices to highlight a particular characteristic of vegetation calculated from a combination of the reflectance at two or more wavelengths. The most common is the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI), which measures the difference between the light reflected at NIR and visible wavelengths. Many other indices reveal other aspects of crop health, vigor, or stress, such as moisture stress, water content, nitrogen content, and other crop-specific variables. Other indices and spectral measurements are used to reveal food quality and safety, including ripeness and bruising, quality grading and sorting, pathogens and contaminants, and non-destructive, non-invasive inspection.