Dr Vineet Kumar | Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Dr Vineet Kumar

Assistant Professor
Mumbai Campus, Centre for Geo Informatics, Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Studies

Qualification

Ph.D - Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

M.Tech - Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Dehradun.

B.Tech - Uttar Pradesh, Technical University, Lucknow.

Contact

vineet.kumar[at]tiss[dot]ac[dot]in

Dr. Vineet Kumar works as an Assistant Professor at Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, India. Prior to that, he worked as a Geospatial data expert at the Geospatial Unit, Land and Water Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO-UN), Rome, Italy. During his tenure at FAO, he supported the ongoing geospatial activities in Sudan, Yemen, and greening the humanitarian response project in four African countries. He also served as a consultant at PixxelSpace India for a brief period of 3 months (April-June) 2023. During his post-doctoral tenure (2019-2022) at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, he led an ESA-sponsored Agricultural SandboxNL project of generating crop parcel-level FAIR geospatial database using Sentinel SAR satellite data over the Netherlands. The database has been used for monitoring 2018 European drought, marking field-level farming activities and simulating the radar backscatter in the crop growth model.

He holds a master’s degree in Remote sensing and GIS from the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO, Dehradun, India and a Ph.D. in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing from IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India. His doctoral research was focused on using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite datasets for state-of-the-art algorithm development for LULC mapping, spatio-temporal analysis, crop phenology and bio-geophysical parameter monitoring and retrieval.

He has planned and participated many in-situ geospatial and bio-physical data collection field campaigns synchronously with satellite imagery acquisitions in India and abroad. He was a part of Soil Moisture Active Passive Validation Experiment (SMAPVEX-MB) Manitoba, Canada field campaign jointly conducted by Agriculture Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), NASA, USDA, and various Canadian universities in June and July 2016.

He has served as a reviewer to high-impact remote sensing Journals such as IEEE TGRS, JSTARS, GRSL, Remote Sensing of Environment, GIScience and Remote Sensing, etc. He co-chaired sessions in the IGARSS-2021 and PolINSAR-2017 conferences. Dr. Kumar received the Shastri Research Student Fellowship in 2016 to work as a visiting researcher at Carleton University and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Canada.

Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0469-3815

Earth observation for sustainability studies

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) polarimetry

Land use land cover change

Geoinformatics for disasters

Publications

Total publications: 40+
Peer-reviewed journals: 23
Book Chapters: 03
Conference proceedings: 16
Conference/Workshop presentations: 15+
FAO reports/maps: 07: https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/cc8795en
H-index: Google Scholar-16/Scopus-11
Citations: 925+ (as of November 2023)
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NVGe-u4AAAAJ&hl=en

Selected Publications

Nikaein, Tina, Paco Lopez-Dekker, Susan Steele-Dunne, Vineet Kumar, and Manuel Huber. "Modeling SAR Observables with Combining a Crop-Growth Model and a Machine-Learning." IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (2023). (link)
Vineet Kumar, Manuel Huber, Bjorn Rommen and Susan C. Steele-Dunne, “Agricultural SandboxNL: A National-scale database of parcel-level, processed Sentinel-1 SAR data”, Nature Scientific Data, 9, 402, 2022. (link)
Maurice Shorachi, Vineet Kumar and Susan C. Steele-Dunne, “Sentinel-1 SAR Backscatter Response to Agricultural Drought in The Netherlands” Remote Sensing (MDPI), 14(10), 2022. (link)
Vineet Kumar, Dipankar Mandal, Avik Bhattacharya and Y. S. Rao, “Crop characterization using an improved scattering power decomposition technique for compact polarimetric SAR data” International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, vol.88, pp.102052, 2020. (link)
Dipankar Mandal, Vineet Kumar, Debanshu Ratha, Subhadip Dey, Avik Bhattacharya, Juan M. Lopez-Sanchez, Heather McNairn, and Y. S. Rao. “Dual Polarimetric Radar Vegetation Index for Crop Growth Monitoring Using Sentinel-1 SAR Data,” Remote Sensing of Environment, 247: 111954, 2020.(link)
Dipankar Mandal, Debanshu Ratha, Avik Bhattacharya, Vineet Kumar, Heather McNairn, Y. S. Rao, and A. C. Frery, “A Radar Vegetation Index for crop monitoring using compact polarimetric SAR data” IEEE Transactions on Geosciences and Remote Sensing, 2020. (link)
Vineet Kumar, Y. S. Rao, Avik Bhattacharya and Shane Cloude, “Classification Assessment of Real vs. Simulated Compact and Quad-Pol Modes of ALOS-2” IEEE Geosciences and Remote Sensing Letters, vol. 16, no. 9, pp. 1497-1501, 2019. (Front cover of issue) (link)
Unmesh Khati, Vineet Kumar, Debmita Bandyopadhyay, Mohammad Musthafa, and Gulab Singh, “Identification of forest cutting in managed forest of Haldwani, India using ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 SAR data” Journal of Environmental Management, vol-213, pp. 503-512, 2018. (link)

Media:

European Space Agency (ESA) story - Monitoring crop health across the Netherlands

Will be updated soon...

MDM-34: Geoinformatics in Preparedness and Response (IV Sem, 2023-24)