Kristof Van Tricht
Senior R&D Professional
Kristof Van Tricht entered the world of remote sensing while pursuing a degree in bioscience engineering at KU Leuven, Belgium. During his studies, he focused on using space-based hyperspectral images to detect invasive tree species. He went on to earn a PhD in Sciences (Geography), concentrating on regional climates and utilizing active CloudSat radar and CALIPSO lidar satellite observations to quantify the impact of clouds on the Greenland ice sheet.
Looking down on earth, knowing that remote sensing helps face worldwide challenges, is the ultimate motivation.
In 2016, Kristof joined the VITO Remote Sensing Agricultural Applications team. Here, he applies remote sensing technologies to map and monitor agriculture on both local and global scales. His work on crop mapping, utilizing a range of algorithms from conventional supervised methods to cutting-edge transformer-based semi-supervised algorithms, aims to contribute to addressing global food security challenges. Kristof is also involved with the CropSAR technology, which fuses Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 observations into cloud-free data streams. This innovation aids downstream applications that typically struggle with interrupted optical data.
Kristof's research projects encompass a wide range of activities, from local Belgian agriculture studies and European crop mapping projects to initiatives supporting African farming practices and the global ESA WorldCereal project. His mission is to ensure that cutting-edge technologies are always accompanied by a solid scientific basis, bridging the gap between fast-moving machine learning advancements and the foundational science of remote sensing.
