Victor Verhaert
While obtaining his master’s degree in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Leuven, Victor focused his thesis on studying convolutional neural networks for facial detection. In 2023, he joined VITO as a data engineer, driven by a passion for leveraging technology to preserve nature and monitor our planet’s health.
At VITO, Victor is part of the openEO Data Engineering team, where he supports various remote sensing projects by setting up and optimizing complex processing pipelines. OpenEO is an opensource API that simplifies and unifies access to Earth observation cloud back-ends, adhering to open science principles and reducing technical overhead for remote sensing researchers.
Victor's expertise and interests includes big data analysis, AI, computer vision and algorithms optimization.
Sessions
The newly established Copernicus Global Land Cover and Tropical Forest Mapping and Monitoring service (LCFM), coordinated by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) and implemented by a consortium led by VITO, marks a significant advancement in land cover mapping. Building on the 100 m Copernicus Global Land Cover layers (2015-2019), LCFM integrates insights from ESA’s WorldCover and Horizon2020 REDDCopernicus projects to deliver a dynamic global land cover service at 10 m resolution for the years 2020-2026.
LCFM will provide global sub-annual (i.e., monthly) land surface features and categories at 10 m resolution, consolidating them into annual land cover maps and tropical forest monitoring products. These data products will be of high quality, free, and open to all users in line with the principles of the Copernicus program. Additionally, LCFM will also release the training data used in its workflows, supporting transparency and fostering further research and development within the community.
A key aspect of LCFM is its foundation on open-source software. Production processes will be conducted on the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem (CDSE) and will be based on the Python ecosystem and the openEO platform. The processing workflows and developed software will be open-sourced and released together with the data products ensuring transparency, reproducibility, and collaboration.
In this presentation, we will introduce the LCFM service and showcase the first data products which will be publicly released in the beginning of 2025. We will highlight the improvements the service brings and explore its potential for downstream applications.