NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index)

NDVI is the most widely used vegetation index, computed as the normalized difference between near-infrared and red reflectance, yielding a value that rises with healthy, photosynthetically active canopy. In pipeline monitoring it provides a cheap, continuously available baseline of vegetation vigour along the right-of-way from free satellite sources such as Sentinel-2. Its weakness for leak detection is sensitivity to soil background and saturation over dense canopy, which is why soil-adjusted variants such as OSAVI are often preferred when the goal is to isolate stress signals rather than measure overall greenness.