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Remote Sens., Volume 11, Issue 11 (June-1 2019) – 137 articles

Cover Story (view full-size image): Change patterns of radar backscattering signal show the spatio-temporal dynamics of agricultural practices along the river valley of Rio Ingenio in Peru. This area is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa. The integrity of this cultural landscape is crucial to preserve the remnants of past civilization settlements. Pairs of StripMap SAR images, acquired by the Italian Space Agency (ASI)’s COSMO-SkyMed constellation every 16 days at ~3 m ground resolution, are quantitatively compared by means of amplitude change detection methods. The resulting change maps allow for regular monitoring of the extent and type of modern development and provide objective evidence to understand the impact on the local landscape. COSMO-SkyMed® Products ©ASI—Italian Space Agency—2017–2018. All Rights Reserved. View this paper.
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28 pages, 5628 KiB  
Review
Twenty Years of ASTER Contributions to Lithologic Mapping and Mineral Exploration
by Michael Abrams and Yasushi Yamaguchi
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1394; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111394 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 79 | Viewed by 14801
Abstract
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer is one of five instruments operating on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Terra platform. Launched in 1999, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) has been acquiring optical data for 20 [...] Read more.
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer is one of five instruments operating on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Terra platform. Launched in 1999, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) has been acquiring optical data for 20 years. ASTER is a joint project between Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; and U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Numerous reports of geologic mapping and mineral exploration applications of ASTER data attest to the unique capabilities of the instrument. Until 2000, Landsat was the instrument of choice to provide surface composition information. Its scanners had two broadband short wave infrared (SWIR) bands and a single thermal infrared band. A single SWIR band amalgamated all diagnostic absorption features in the 2–2.5 micron wavelength region into a single band, providing no information on mineral composition. Clays, carbonates, and sulfates could only be detected as a single group. The single thermal infrared (TIR) band provided no information on silicate composition (felsic vs. mafic igneous rocks; quartz content of sedimentary rocks). Since 2000, all of these mineralogical distinctions, and more, could be accomplished due to ASTER’s unique, high spatial resolution multispectral bands: six in the SWIR and five in the TIR. The data have sufficient information to provide good results using the simplest techniques, like band ratios, or more sophisticated analyses, like machine learning. A robust archive of images facilitated use of the data for global exploration and mapping. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue ASTER 20th Anniversary)
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17 pages, 2905 KiB  
Article
Hyperspectral Imaging Retrieval Using MODIS Satellite Sensors Applied to Volcanic Ash Clouds Monitoring
by Luis Arias, Jose Cifuentes, Milton Marín, Fernando Castillo and Hugo Garcés
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1393; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111393 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4965
Abstract
In this paper, we present a method for hyperspectral retrieval using multispectral satellite images. The method consists of the use of training spectral data with a compressive capability. By using principal component analysis (PCA), a proper number of basis vectors are extracted. These [...] Read more.
In this paper, we present a method for hyperspectral retrieval using multispectral satellite images. The method consists of the use of training spectral data with a compressive capability. By using principal component analysis (PCA), a proper number of basis vectors are extracted. These vectors are properly combined and weighted by the sensors’ responses from visible MODIS channels, achieving as a result the retrieval of hyperspectral images. Once MODIS channels are used for hyperspectral retrieval, the training spectra are projected over the recovered data, and the ground-based process used for training can be reliably detected. To probe the method, we use only four visible images from MODIS for large-scale ash clouds’ monitoring from volcanic eruptions. A high-spectral resolution data of reflectances from ash was measured in the laboratory. Using PCA, we select four basis vectors, which combined with MODIS sensors responses, allows estimating hyperspectral images. By comparing both the estimated hyperspectral images and the training spectra, it is feasible to identify the presence of ash clouds at a pixel-by-pixel level, even in the presence of water clouds. Finally, by using a radiometric model applied over hyperspectral retrieved data, the relative concentration of the volcanic ash in the cloud is obtained. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the classical method based on temperature differences (using infrared MODIS channels), and the results show an excellent match, outperforming the infrared-based approach. This proposal opens new avenues to increase the potential of multispectral remote systems, which can be even extended to other applications and spectral bands for remote sensing. The results show that the method could play an essential role by providing more accurate information of volcanic ash spatial dispersion, enabling one to prevent several hazards related to volcanic ash where volcanoes’ monitoring is not feasible. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Remote Sensing of Air Quality)
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20 pages, 5580 KiB  
Article
Interannual and Seasonal Vegetation Changes and Influencing Factors in the Extra-High Mountainous Areas of Southern Tibet
by Zu-Xin Ye, Wei-Ming Cheng, Zhi-Qi Zhao, Jian-Yang Guo, Hu Ding and Nan Wang
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1392; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111392 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 15 | Viewed by 3700
Abstract
The ecosystem of extra-high mountain areas is very fragile. Understanding local vegetation changes is crucial for projecting ecosystem dynamics. In this paper, we make a case for Himalayan mountain areas to explore vegetation dynamics and their influencing factors. Firstly, the interannual trends of [...] Read more.
The ecosystem of extra-high mountain areas is very fragile. Understanding local vegetation changes is crucial for projecting ecosystem dynamics. In this paper, we make a case for Himalayan mountain areas to explore vegetation dynamics and their influencing factors. Firstly, the interannual trends of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) were extracted by the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) algorithm and linear regression method. Moreover, the influence of environmental factors on interannual NDVI trends was assessed using the Random Forests algorithm and partial dependence plots. Subsequently, the time-lag effects of seasonal NDVI on different climatic factors were discussed and the effects of these factors on seasonal NDVI changes were determined by partial correlation analysis. The results show that (1) an overall weak upward trend was observed in NDVI variations from 1982 to 2015, and 1989 is considered to be the breakpoint of the NDVI time series; (2) interannual temperature trends and the shortest distance to large lakes were the most important factors in explaining interannual NDVI trends. Temperature trends were positively correlated with NDVI trends. The relationship between the shortest distance to large lakes and the NDVI trend is an inverted U-shaped; (3) the time-lags of NDVI responses to four climatic factors were shorter in Autumn than that in Summer. The NDVI responds quickly to precipitation and downward long-wave radiation; (4) downward long-wave radiation was the main climate factor that influenced NDVI changes in Autumn and the growing season because of the warming effect at night. This study is important to improve the understanding of vegetation changes in mountainous regions. Full article
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23 pages, 3707 KiB  
Article
Precise Onboard Real-Time Orbit Determination with a Low-Cost Single-Frequency GPS/BDS Receiver
by Xuewen Gong, Lei Guo, Fuhong Wang, Wanwei Zhang, Jizhang Sang, Maorong Ge and Harald Schuh
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1391; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111391 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4127
Abstract
The low-cost single-frequency GNSS receiver is one of the most economical and affordable tools for the onboard real-time navigation of numerous remote sensing small/micro satellites. We concentrate on the algorithm and experiments of onboard real-time orbit determination (RTOD) based on a single-frequency GPS/BDS [...] Read more.
The low-cost single-frequency GNSS receiver is one of the most economical and affordable tools for the onboard real-time navigation of numerous remote sensing small/micro satellites. We concentrate on the algorithm and experiments of onboard real-time orbit determination (RTOD) based on a single-frequency GPS/BDS receiver. Through various experiments of processing the real single-frequency GPS/BDS measurements from the Yaogan-30 (YG30) series and FengYun-3C (FY3C) satellites of China, some critical aspects of the onboard RTOD are investigated, such as the optimal force models setting, the effect of different measurements, and the impact of GPS/BDS fusion. The results demonstrate that a gravity model truncated to 55 × 55 order/degree for YG30 and 45 × 45 for FY3C and compensated with an optimal stochastic modeling of empirical accelerations, which minimize the onboard computational load and only result in a slight loss of orbit accuracy, is sufficient to obtain high-precision real-time orbit results. Under the optimal force models, the real-time orbit accuracy of 0.4–0.7 m for position and 0.4–0.7 mm/s for velocity is achievable with the carrier-phase-based solution, while an inferior real-time orbit accuracy of 0.8–1.6 m for position and 0.9–1.7 mm/s for velocity is achieved with the pseudo-range-based solution. Furthermore, although the GPS/BDS fusion only makes little change to the orbit accuracy, it increases the number of visible GNSS satellites significantly, and thus enhances the geometric distribution of GNSS satellites that help suppress the local orbit errors and improves the reliability and availability of the onboard RTOD, especially in some anomalous arcs where only a few GPS satellites are trackable. Full article
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16 pages, 910 KiB  
Article
Performance Impact of Parameter Tuning on the CCSDS-123.0-B-2 Low-Complexity Lossless and Near-Lossless Multispectral and Hyperspectral Image Compression Standard
by Ian Blanes, Aaron Kiely, Miguel Hernández-Cabronero and Joan Serra-Sagristà
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1390; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111390 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 18 | Viewed by 3687
Abstract
This article studies the performance impact related to different parameter choices for the new CCSDS-123.0-B-2 Low-Complexity Lossless and Near-Lossless Multispectral and Hyperspectral Image Compression standard. This standard supersedes CCSDS-123.0-B-1 and extends it by incorporating a new near-lossless compression capability, as well as other [...] Read more.
This article studies the performance impact related to different parameter choices for the new CCSDS-123.0-B-2 Low-Complexity Lossless and Near-Lossless Multispectral and Hyperspectral Image Compression standard. This standard supersedes CCSDS-123.0-B-1 and extends it by incorporating a new near-lossless compression capability, as well as other new features. This article studies the coding performance impact of different choices for the principal parameters of the new extensions, in addition to reviewing related parameter choices for existing features. Experimental results include data from 16 different instruments with varying detector types, image dimensions, number of spectral bands, bit depth, level of noise, level of calibration, and other image characteristics. Guidelines are provided on how to adjust the parameters in relation to their coding performance impact. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Remote Sensing Data Compression)
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17 pages, 3612 KiB  
Article
A Sub-Regional Extraction Method of Common Mode Components from IGS and CMONOC Stations in China
by Shuguang Wu, Guigen Nie, Jingnan Liu, Kezhi Wang, Changhu Xue, Jing Wang, Haiyang Li, Fengyou Peng and Xiaobin Ren
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1389; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111389 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 3641
Abstract
There is always a need to extract more accurate regional common mode component (CMC) series from coordinate time series of Global Positioning System (GPS) stations, which would be of great benefit to describe the deformation features of the Earth’s surface with more reliability. [...] Read more.
There is always a need to extract more accurate regional common mode component (CMC) series from coordinate time series of Global Positioning System (GPS) stations, which would be of great benefit to describe the deformation features of the Earth’s surface with more reliability. For this purpose, this paper combines all 11 International Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service (IGS) stations in China with over 70 stations selected from the Crustal Movement Observation Network of China (CMONOC) to compute CMC series of IGS stations by using a principal component analysis (PCA) method under cases of one whole region and eight sub-regions. The comparison results show that the percentage of first-order principal component (PC1) in North, East and Up components increase by 10.8%, 16.1% and 25.1%, respectively, after dividing the whole China region into eight sub-regions. Meanwhile, Root Mean Square (RMS) reduction rates of residual series that have removed CMC also improve obviously after partitioning. In addition, we compute displacements of these IGS stations caused by environmental loadings (including atmospheric pressure loading, non-tidal oceanic loading and hydrological loading) to analyze their contributions to the non-linear variation in GPS coordinate time series. The comparison result shows that the method we raise, PCA filtering in sub-regions, performs better than the environmental loading corrections (ELCs) in improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of GPS coordinate time series. This paper raises new criteria for selecting appropriate CMONOC stations around IGS stations when computing sub-regional CMC, involving three criteria of interstation distance, geology and self-condition of stations themselves. According to experiments, these criteria are implemental and effective in selecting suitable stations, by which to extract sub-regional CMC with higher accuracy. Full article
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15 pages, 24283 KiB  
Technical Note
From Archived Historical Aerial Imagery to Informative Orthophotos: A Framework for Retrieving the Past in Long-Term Socioecological Research
by Ana Teresa Pinto, José A. Gonçalves, Pedro Beja and João Pradinho Honrado
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1388; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111388 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 38 | Viewed by 7112
Abstract
Aerial photographs have been systematically collected from as early as the 1930s, providing a unique resource to describe changes in vegetation and land cover over extended periods of time. However, their use is often limited by technical constraints, such as the lack of [...] Read more.
Aerial photographs have been systematically collected from as early as the 1930s, providing a unique resource to describe changes in vegetation and land cover over extended periods of time. However, their use is often limited by technical constraints, such as the lack of ground control information and precise camera parameters, which hamper an accurate orthorectification of the raw imagery. Here, we describe the historical aerial photographs orthorectification (HAPO) workflow, based on a conventional photogrammetric procedure (the direct linear transformation (DLT) Method), integrated as a geographic information systems (GIS) procedure, in order to perform the image orientation and orthorectification, thereby converting historical aerial imagery into high-definition historical orthoimages. HAPO implementation is illustrated with an application to a rugged landscape in Portugal, where we aimed to produce land-cover maps using an aerial photograph coverage from 1947, as part of a study on long-term socioecological dynamics. We show that HAPO produces highly accurate orthoimages and discuss the wider usefulness of our framework in long-term socioecological research. Full article
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15 pages, 3231 KiB  
Technical Note
The Integration of Photodiode and Camera for Visible Light Positioning by Using Fixed-Lag Ensemble Kalman Smoother
by Yuan Zhuang, Qin Wang, You Li, Zhouzheng Gao, Bingpeng Zhou, Longning Qi, Jun Yang, Ruizhi Chen and Naser El-Sheimy
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1387; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111387 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 3574
Abstract
Visible Light Positioning (VLP) has become one of the most popular positioning and navigation systems in this decade. Filter-based VLP systems can provide real-time solutions but have limited accuracy. On the contrary, fixed-interval smoothers can help VLP achieve higher accuracy but require post-processing. [...] Read more.
Visible Light Positioning (VLP) has become one of the most popular positioning and navigation systems in this decade. Filter-based VLP systems can provide real-time solutions but have limited accuracy. On the contrary, fixed-interval smoothers can help VLP achieve higher accuracy but require post-processing. In this article, a trade-off solution, Fixed-Lag Ensemble Kalman Smoother (FLEnKS), is proposed for VLP to achieve a semi-real-time and accurate positioning solution. The forward part of the FLEnKS is based on the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF), which uses stochastic sampling with ensemble members and enables a better reflection of the features of nonlinear systems. The backward filter in the FLEnKS compensates for the estimation error from the forward filter using the linearization based on error states and further reduces the estimation error. Furthermore, multiple data from both photodiode (PD) and camera are fused in the proposed FLEnKS for VLP, which further improves the accuracy of conventional VLP with a single data source. Preliminary field test results show that the proposed FLEnKS provides a semi-real-time positioning solution with the average 3D positioning accuracy of 15.63 cm in dynamic tests. Full article
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21 pages, 4383 KiB  
Article
A New Empirical Model of NmF2 Based on CHAMP, GRACE, and COSMIC Radio Occultation
by Zhendi Liu, Hanxian Fang, M. M. Hoque, Libin Weng, Shenggao Yang and Ze Gao
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1386; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111386 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 4659
Abstract
To facilitate F2-layer peak density (NmF2) modeling, a nonlinear polynomial model approach based on global NmF2 observational data from ionospheric radio occultation (IRO) measurements onboard the CHAMP, GRACE, and COSMIC satellites, is presented in this paper. We divided the globe into 63 slices [...] Read more.
To facilitate F2-layer peak density (NmF2) modeling, a nonlinear polynomial model approach based on global NmF2 observational data from ionospheric radio occultation (IRO) measurements onboard the CHAMP, GRACE, and COSMIC satellites, is presented in this paper. We divided the globe into 63 slices from 80°S to 80°N according to geomagnetic latitude. A Nonlinear Polynomial Peak Density Model (NPPDM) was constructed by a multivariable least squares fitting to NmF2 measurements in each latitude slice and the dependencies of NmF2 on solar activity, geographical longitude, universal time, and day of year were described. The model was designed for quiet and moderate geomagnetic conditions (Ap ≤ 32). Using independent radio occultation data, quantitative analysis was made. The correlation coefficients between NPPDM predictions and IRO data were 0.91 in 2002 and 0.82 in 2005. The results show that NPPDM performs better than IRI2016 and Neustrelitz Peak Density Model (NPDM) under low solar activity, while it undergoes performance degradation under high solar activity. Using data from twelve ionosonde stations, the accuracy of NPPDM was found to be better than that of NPDM and comparable to that of IRI2016. Additionally, NPPDM can well simulate the variations and distributions of NmF2 and describe some ionospheric features, including the equatorial ionization anomaly, the mid-latitude trough, and the wavenumber-four longitudinal structure. Full article
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18 pages, 11090 KiB  
Article
Retrieval of Salt Marsh Above-Ground Biomass from High-Spatial Resolution Hyperspectral Imagery Using PROSAIL
by Rehman S. Eon, Sarah Goldsmith, Charles M. Bachmann, Anna Christina Tyler, Christopher S. Lapszynski, Gregory P. Badura, David T. Osgood and Ryan Brett
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1385; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111385 - 11 Jun 2019
Cited by 20 | Viewed by 5301
Abstract
Salt marsh vegetation density varies considerably on short spatial scales, complicating attempts to evaluate plant characteristics using airborne remote sensing approaches. In this study, we used a mast-mounted hyperspectral imaging system to obtain cm-scale imagery of a salt marsh chronosequence on Hog Island, [...] Read more.
Salt marsh vegetation density varies considerably on short spatial scales, complicating attempts to evaluate plant characteristics using airborne remote sensing approaches. In this study, we used a mast-mounted hyperspectral imaging system to obtain cm-scale imagery of a salt marsh chronosequence on Hog Island, VA, where the morphology and biomass of the dominant plant species, Spartina alterniflora, varies widely. The high-resolution hyperspectral imagery allowed the detailed delineation of variations in above-ground biomass, which we retrieved from the imagery using the PROSAIL radiative transfer model. The retrieved biomass estimates correlated well with contemporaneously collected in situ biomass ground truth data ( R 2 = 0.73 ). In this study, we also rescaled our hyperspectral imagery and retrieved PROSAIL salt marsh biomass to determine the applicability of the method across spatial scales. Histograms of retrieved biomass changed considerably in characteristic marsh regions as the spatial scale of the imagery was progressively degraded. This rescaling revealed a loss of spatial detail and a shift in the mean retrieved biomass. This shift is indicative of the loss of accuracy that may occur when scaling up through a simple averaging approach that does not account for the detail found in the landscape at the natural scale of variation of the salt marsh system. This illustrated the importance of developing methodologies to appropriately scale results from very fine scale resolution up to the more coarse-scale resolutions commonly obtained in airborne and satellite remote sensing. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Satellite-Based Wetland Observation)
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18 pages, 5141 KiB  
Article
Virtual Restoration of Stained Chinese Paintings Using Patch-Based Color Constrained Poisson Editing with Selected Hyperspectral Feature Bands
by Pingping Zhou, Miaole Hou, Shuqiang Lv, Xuesheng Zhao and Wangting Wu
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1384; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111384 - 10 Jun 2019
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3556
Abstract
Stains, as one of most common degradations of paper cultural relics, not only affect paintings’ appearance, but sometimes even cover the text, patterns, and colors contained in the relics. Virtual restorations based on common red–green–blue images (RGB) which remove the degradations and then [...] Read more.
Stains, as one of most common degradations of paper cultural relics, not only affect paintings’ appearance, but sometimes even cover the text, patterns, and colors contained in the relics. Virtual restorations based on common red–green–blue images (RGB) which remove the degradations and then fill the lacuna regions with the image’s known parts with the inpainting technology could produce a visually plausible result. However, due to the lack of information inside the degradations, they always yield inconsistent structures when stains cover several color materials. To effectively remove the stains and restore the covered original contents of Chinese paintings, a novel method based on Poisson editing is proposed by exploiting the information inside the degradations of selected three feature bands as the auxiliary information to guide the restoration since the selected feature bands captured fewer stains and could expose the covered information. To make the Poisson editing suitable for stain removal, the feature bands were also exploited to search for the optimal patch for the pixels in the stain region, and the searched patch was used to construct the color constraint on the original Poisson editing to ensure the restoration of the original color of paintings. Specifically, this method mainly consists of two steps: feature band selection from hyperspectral data by establishing rules and reconstruction of stain contaminated regions of RGB image with color constrained Poisson editing. Four Chinese paintings (‘Fishing’, ‘Crane and Banana’, ‘the Hui Nationality Painting’, and ‘Lotus Pond and Wild Goose’) with different color materials were used to test the performance of the proposed method. Visual results show that this method can effectively remove or dilute the stains while restoring a painting’s original colors. By comparing values of restored pixels with nonstained pixels (reference of their same color materials), images processed by the proposed method had the lowest average root mean square error (RMSE), normalized absolute error (NAE), and average differences (AD), which indicates that it is an effective method to restore the stains of Chinese paintings. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Remote Sensing Image Restoration and Reconstruction)
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27 pages, 35990 KiB  
Article
Towards Automatic Segmentation and Recognition of Multiple Precast Concrete Elements in Outdoor Laser Scan Data
by Jiepeng Liu, Dongsheng Li, Liang Feng, Pengkun Liu and Wenbo Wu
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1383; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111383 - 10 Jun 2019
Cited by 19 | Viewed by 4603
Abstract
To date, to improve construction quality and efficiency and reduce environmental pollution, the use of precast concrete elements (PCEs) has become popular in civil engineering. As PCEs are manufactured in a batch manner and possess complicated shapes, traditional manual inspection methods cannot meet [...] Read more.
To date, to improve construction quality and efficiency and reduce environmental pollution, the use of precast concrete elements (PCEs) has become popular in civil engineering. As PCEs are manufactured in a batch manner and possess complicated shapes, traditional manual inspection methods cannot meet today’s requirements in terms of production rate of PCEs. The manual inspection of PCEs needs to be conducted one by one after the production, resulting in the excessive storage of finished PCEs in the storage yards. Therefore, many studies have proposed the use of terrestrial laser scanners (TLSs) for the quality inspection of PCEs. However, all these studies focus on the data of a single PCE or a single surface of PCE, which is acquired from a unique or predefined scanning angle. It is thus still inefficient and impractical in reality, where hundred types of PCEs with different properties may exist. Taking this cue, this study proposes to scan multiple PCEs simultaneously to improve the inspection efficiency by using TLSs. In particular, a segmentation and recognition approach is proposed to automatically extract and identify the different types of PCEs in a large amount of outdoor laser scan data. For the data segmentation, 3D data is first converted into 2D images. Image processing is then combined with radially bounded nearest neighbor graph (RBNN) algorithm to speed up the laser scan data segmentation. For the PCE recognition, based on the as-designed models of PCEs in building information modeling (BIM), the proposed method uses a coarse matching and a fine matching to recognize the type of each PCE data. To the best of our knowledge, no research work has been conducted on the automatic recognition of PCEs from a million or even ten million of the outdoor laser scan points, which contain many different types of PCEs. To verify the feasibility of the proposed method, experimental studies have been conducted on the PCE outdoor laser scan data, considering the shape, type, and amount of PCEs. In total, 22 PCEs including 12 different types are involved in this paper. Experiment results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach for automatic segmentation and recognition of different PCEs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Point Cloud Processing in Remote Sensing)
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23 pages, 6051 KiB  
Article
End-to-End Change Detection for High Resolution Satellite Images Using Improved UNet++
by Daifeng Peng, Yongjun Zhang and Haiyan Guan
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1382; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111382 - 10 Jun 2019
Cited by 567 | Viewed by 26576
Abstract
Change detection (CD) is essential to the accurate understanding of land surface changes using available Earth observation data. Due to the great advantages in deep feature representation and nonlinear problem modeling, deep learning is becoming increasingly popular to solve CD tasks in remote-sensing [...] Read more.
Change detection (CD) is essential to the accurate understanding of land surface changes using available Earth observation data. Due to the great advantages in deep feature representation and nonlinear problem modeling, deep learning is becoming increasingly popular to solve CD tasks in remote-sensing community. However, most existing deep learning-based CD methods are implemented by either generating difference images using deep features or learning change relations between pixel patches, which leads to error accumulation problems since many intermediate processing steps are needed to obtain final change maps. To address the above-mentioned issues, a novel end-to-end CD method is proposed based on an effective encoder-decoder architecture for semantic segmentation named UNet++, where change maps could be learned from scratch using available annotated datasets. Firstly, co-registered image pairs are concatenated as an input for the improved UNet++ network, where both global and fine-grained information can be utilized to generate feature maps with high spatial accuracy. Then, the fusion strategy of multiple side outputs is adopted to combine change maps from different semantic levels, thereby generating a final change map with high accuracy. The effectiveness and reliability of our proposed CD method are verified on very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite image datasets. Extensive experimental results have shown that our proposed approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art CD methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Change Detection Using Multi-Source Remotely Sensed Imagery)
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23 pages, 14467 KiB  
Article
Adaptive Contrast Enhancement for Infrared Images Based on the Neighborhood Conditional Histogram
by Chengwei Liu, Xiubao Sui, Xiaodong Kuang, Yuan Liu, Guohua Gu and Qian Chen
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1381; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111381 - 10 Jun 2019
Cited by 24 | Viewed by 6660
Abstract
In this paper, an adaptive contrast enhancement method based on the neighborhood conditional histogram is proposed to improve the visual quality of thermal infrared images. Existing block-based local contrast enhancement methods usually suffer from the over-enhancement of smooth regions or the loss of [...] Read more.
In this paper, an adaptive contrast enhancement method based on the neighborhood conditional histogram is proposed to improve the visual quality of thermal infrared images. Existing block-based local contrast enhancement methods usually suffer from the over-enhancement of smooth regions or the loss of some details. To address these drawbacks, we first introduce a neighborhood conditional histogram to adaptively enhance the contrast and avoid the over-enhancement caused by the original histogram. Then the clip-redistributed histogram of the contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) is replaced by the neighborhood conditional histogram. In addition, the local mapping function of each sub-block is updated based on the global mapping function to further eliminate the block artifacts. Lastly, the optimized local contrast enhancement process, which combines both global and local enhanced results is employed to obtain the desired enhanced result. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and the other five methods are introduced as a comparison. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other block-based methods on local contrast enhancement, visual quality improvement, and noise suppression. Full article
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23 pages, 5402 KiB  
Article
Mapping Invasive Phragmites australis in the Old Woman Creek Estuary Using UAV Remote Sensing and Machine Learning Classifiers
by Tharindu Abeysinghe, Anita Simic Milas, Kristin Arend, Breann Hohman, Patrick Reil, Andrew Gregory and Angélica Vázquez-Ortega
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1380; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111380 - 10 Jun 2019
Cited by 69 | Viewed by 8430
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are increasingly used for spatiotemporal monitoring of invasive plants in coastal wetlands. Early identification of invasive species is necessary in planning, restoring, and managing wetlands. This study assessed the effectiveness of UAV technology to identify invasive Phragmites australis in [...] Read more.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are increasingly used for spatiotemporal monitoring of invasive plants in coastal wetlands. Early identification of invasive species is necessary in planning, restoring, and managing wetlands. This study assessed the effectiveness of UAV technology to identify invasive Phragmites australis in the Old Woman Creek (OWC) estuary using machine learning (ML) algorithms: Neural network (NN), support vector machine (SVM), and k-nearest neighbor (kNN). The ML algorithms were compared with the parametric maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) using pixel- and object-based methods. Pixel-based NN was identified as the best classifier with an overall accuracy of 94.80% and the lowest error of omission of 1.59%, the outcome desirable for effective eradication of Phragmites. The results were reached combining Sequoia multispectral imagery (green, red, red edge, and near-infrared bands) combined with the canopy height model (CHM) acquired in the mid-growing season and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) acquired later in the season. The sensitivity analysis, using various vegetation indices, image texture, CHM, and principal components (PC), demonstrated the impact of various feature layers on the classifiers. The study emphasizes the necessity of a suitable sampling and cross-validation methods, as well as the importance of optimum classification parameters. Full article
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15 pages, 40945 KiB  
Letter
Refined Model-Based and Feature-Driven Extraction of Buildings from PolSAR Images
by Hui Fan, Sinong Quan, Dahai Dai, Xuesong Wang and Shunping Xiao
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1379; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111379 - 10 Jun 2019
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 2736
Abstract
Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) building extraction plays an important role in urban planning, disaster management, etc. In this paper, a building extraction method using refined model-based decomposition and robust scattering feature is proposed. On the one hand, the newly proposed refined five-component [...] Read more.
Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) building extraction plays an important role in urban planning, disaster management, etc. In this paper, a building extraction method using refined model-based decomposition and robust scattering feature is proposed. On the one hand, the newly proposed refined five-component decomposition and its derived scattering powers are applied to detect the buildings. On the other hand, by combining the matrix elements and co-polarization correlation coefficient, a robust feature is proposed to discriminate buildings and non-buildings. Both these two preliminary extraction results are obtained through thresholding segmentation. Finally, they are fused via the HX Markov random fields so as to further improve the extraction accuracy. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated and evaluated with Gaofen-3 and uninhabited aerial vehicle SAR full PolSAR data over different test sites. Outputs show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods and provides an overall accuracy of over 90%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Urban Remote Sensing)
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26 pages, 9025 KiB  
Article
Geographically Weighted Machine Learning and Downscaling for High-Resolution Spatiotemporal Estimations of Wind Speed
by Lianfa Li
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1378; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111378 - 10 Jun 2019
Cited by 47 | Viewed by 7267
Abstract
High-resolution spatiotemporal wind speed mapping is useful for atmospheric environmental monitoring, air quality evaluation and wind power siting. Although modern reanalysis techniques can obtain reliable interpolated surfaces of meteorology at a high temporal resolution, their spatial resolutions are coarse. Local variability of wind [...] Read more.
High-resolution spatiotemporal wind speed mapping is useful for atmospheric environmental monitoring, air quality evaluation and wind power siting. Although modern reanalysis techniques can obtain reliable interpolated surfaces of meteorology at a high temporal resolution, their spatial resolutions are coarse. Local variability of wind speed is difficult to capture due to its volatility. Here, a two-stage approach was developed for robust spatiotemporal estimations of wind speed at a high resolution. The proposed approach consists of geographically weighted ensemble machine learning (Stage 1) and downscaling based on meteorological reanalysis data (Stage 2). The geographically weighted machine learning method is based on three base learners, which are an autoencoder-based deep residual network, XGBoost and random forest, and it incorporates spatial autocorrelation and heterogeneity to boost the ensemble predictions. With reanalysis data, downscaling was introduced in Stage 2 to reduce bias and spatial abrupt (non-natural) variation in the predictions inferred from Stage 1. The autoencoder-based residual network was used in Stage 2 to adjust the difference between the averages of the fine-resolution predicted values and the coarse-resolution reanalysis data to ensure consistency. Using mainland China as a case study, the geographically weighted regression (GWR) ensemble predictions were shown to perform better than individual learners’ predictions (with an approximately 12–16% improvement in R2 and a decrease of 0.14–0.19 m/s in root mean square error). Downscaling further improved the predictions by reducing inconsistency and obtaining better spatial variation (smoothing). The proposed approach can also be applied for the high-resolution spatiotemporal estimation of other meteorological parameters or surface variables involving remote sensing images (i.e. reliable coarsely resolved data), ground monitoring data and other relevant factors. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Atmospheric Remote Sensing)
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22 pages, 9486 KiB  
Article
Automatic Detection of Track and Fields in China from High-Resolution Satellite Images Using Multi-Scale-Fused Single Shot MultiBox Detector
by Zhengchao Chen, Kaixuan Lu, Lianru Gao, Baipeng Li, Jianwei Gao, Xuan Yang, Mufeng Yao and Bing Zhang
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1377; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111377 - 10 Jun 2019
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4848
Abstract
Object detection is facing various challenges as an important aspect in the field of remote sensing—especially in large scenes due to the increase of satellite image resolution and the complexity of land covers. Because of the diversity of the appearance of track and [...] Read more.
Object detection is facing various challenges as an important aspect in the field of remote sensing—especially in large scenes due to the increase of satellite image resolution and the complexity of land covers. Because of the diversity of the appearance of track and fields, the complexity of the background and the variety between satellite images, even superior deep learning methods have difficulty extracting accurate characteristics of track and field from large complex scenes, such as the whole of China. Taking track and field as a study case, we propose a stable and accurate method for target detection. Firstly, we add the “deconvolution” and “concat” module to the structure of the original Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD), where Visual Geometry Group 16 (VGG16) is served as a basic network, followed by multiple convolution layers. The two modules are used to sample the high-level feature map and connect it with the low-level feature map to form a new network structure multi-scale-fused SSD (abbreviated as MSF_SSD). MSF-SSD can enrich the semantic information of the low-level feature, which is especially effective for small targets in large scenes. In addition, a large number of track and fields are collected as samples for the whole China and a series of parameters are designed to optimize the MSF_SSD network through the deep analysis of sample characteristics. Finally, by using MSF_SSD network, we achieve the rapid and automatic detection of meter-level track and fields in the country for the first time. The proposed MSF_SSD model achieves 97.9% mean average precision (mAP) on validation set which is superior to the 88.4% mAP of the original SSD. Apart from this, the model can achieve an accuracy of 94.3% while keeping the recall rate in a high level (98.8%) in the nationally distributed test set, outperforming the original SSD method. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Big Data in Remote Sensing)
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26 pages, 14336 KiB  
Article
A Novel Effectively Optimized One-Stage Network for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery
by Weiying Xie, Haonan Qin, Yunsong Li, Zhuo Wang and Jie Lei
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1376; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111376 - 9 Jun 2019
Cited by 21 | Viewed by 4425
Abstract
With great significance in military and civilian applications, the topic of detecting small and densely arranged objects in wide-scale remote sensing imagery is still challenging nowadays. To solve this problem, we propose a novel effectively optimized one-stage network (NEOON). As a fully convolutional [...] Read more.
With great significance in military and civilian applications, the topic of detecting small and densely arranged objects in wide-scale remote sensing imagery is still challenging nowadays. To solve this problem, we propose a novel effectively optimized one-stage network (NEOON). As a fully convolutional network, NEOON consists of four parts: Feature extraction, feature fusion, feature enhancement, and multi-scale detection. To extract effective features, the first part has implemented bottom-up and top-down coherent processing by taking successive down-sampling and up-sampling operations in conjunction with residual modules. The second part consolidates high-level and low-level features by adopting concatenation operations with subsequent convolutional operations to explicitly yield strong feature representation and semantic information. The third part is implemented by constructing a receptive field enhancement (RFE) module and incorporating it into the fore part of the network where the information of small objects exists. The final part is achieved by four detectors with different sensitivities accessing the fused features, all four parallel, to enable the network to make full use of information of objects in different scales. Besides, the Focal Loss is set to enable the cross entropy for classification to solve the tough problem of class imbalance in one-stage methods. In addition, we introduce the Soft-NMS to preserve accurate bounding boxes in the post-processing stage especially for densely arranged objects. Note that the split and merge strategy and multi-scale training strategy are employed in training. Thorough experiments are performed on ACS datasets constructed by us and NWPU VHR-10 datasets to evaluate the performance of NEOON. Specifically, 4.77% and 5.50% improvements in mAP and recall, respectively, on the ACS dataset as compared to YOLOv3 powerfully prove that NEOON can effectually improve the detection accuracy of small objects in remote sensing imagery. In addition, extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluations on the NWPU VHR-10 dataset with 10 classes have illustrated the superiority of NEOON in the extraction of spatial information of high-resolution remote sensing images. Full article
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22 pages, 10872 KiB  
Article
An Automated Python Language-Based Tool for Creating Absence Samples in Groundwater Potential Mapping
by Omid Rahmati, Davoud Davoudi Moghaddam, Vahid Moosavi, Zahra Kalantari, Mahmood Samadi, Saro Lee and Dieu Tien Bui
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1375; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111375 - 9 Jun 2019
Cited by 21 | Viewed by 6688
Abstract
Although sampling strategy plays an important role in groundwater potential mapping and significantly influences model accuracy, researchers often apply a simple random sampling method to determine absence (non-occurrence) samples. In this study, an automated, user-friendly geographic information system (GIS)-based tool, selection of absence [...] Read more.
Although sampling strategy plays an important role in groundwater potential mapping and significantly influences model accuracy, researchers often apply a simple random sampling method to determine absence (non-occurrence) samples. In this study, an automated, user-friendly geographic information system (GIS)-based tool, selection of absence samples (SAS), was developed using the Python programming language. The SAS tool takes into account different geospatial concepts, including nearest neighbor (NN) and hotspot analyses. In a case study, it was successfully applied to the Bojnourd watershed, Iran, together with two machine learning models (random forest (RF) and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS)) with GIS and remotely sensed data, to model groundwater potential. Different evaluation criteria (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC), true skill statistic (TSS), efficiency (E), false positive rate (FPR), true positive rate (TPR), true negative rate (TNR), and false negative rate (FNR)) were used to scrutinize model performance. Two absence sample types were produced, based on a simple random method and the SAS tool, and used in the models. The results demonstrated that both RF (AUC-ROC = 0.913, TSS = 0.72, E = 0.926) and MARS (AUC-ROC = 0.889, TSS = 0.705, E = 0.90) performed better when using absence samples generated by the SAS tool, indicating that this tool is capable of producing trustworthy absence samples to improve groundwater potential models. Full article
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19 pages, 522 KiB  
Article
Deep Transfer Learning for Few-Shot SAR Image Classification
by Mohammad Rostami, Soheil Kolouri, Eric Eaton and Kyungnam Kim
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1374; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111374 - 8 Jun 2019
Cited by 199 | Viewed by 11351
Abstract
The reemergence of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has lead to high-performance supervised learning algorithms for the Electro-Optical (EO) domain classification and detection problems. This success is because generating huge labeled datasets has become possible using modern crowdsourcing labeling platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical [...] Read more.
The reemergence of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has lead to high-performance supervised learning algorithms for the Electro-Optical (EO) domain classification and detection problems. This success is because generating huge labeled datasets has become possible using modern crowdsourcing labeling platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that recruit ordinary people to label data. Unlike the EO domain, labeling the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) domain data can be much more challenging, and for various reasons, using crowdsourcing platforms is not feasible for labeling the SAR domain data. As a result, training deep networks using supervised learning is more challenging in the SAR domain. In the paper, we present a new framework to train a deep neural network for classifying Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images by eliminating the need for a huge labeled dataset. Our idea is based on transferring knowledge from a related EO domain problem, where labeled data are easy to obtain. We transfer knowledge from the EO domain through learning a shared invariant cross-domain embedding space that is also discriminative for classification. To this end, we train two deep encoders that are coupled through their last year to map data points from the EO and the SAR domains to the shared embedding space such that the distance between the distributions of the two domains is minimized in the latent embedding space. We use the Sliced Wasserstein Distance (SWD) to measure and minimize the distance between these two distributions and use a limited number of SAR label data points to match the distributions class-conditionally. As a result of this training procedure, a classifier trained from the embedding space to the label space using mostly the EO data would generalize well on the SAR domain. We provide a theoretical analysis to demonstrate why our approach is effective and validate our algorithm on the problem of ship classification in the SAR domain by comparing against several other competing learning approaches. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Transfer Learning for Remote Sensing)
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22 pages, 15608 KiB  
Article
UAV-Based Remote Sensing Technique to Detect Citrus Canker Disease Utilizing Hyperspectral Imaging and Machine Learning
by Jaafar Abdulridha, Ozgur Batuman and Yiannis Ampatzidis
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1373; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111373 - 8 Jun 2019
Cited by 166 | Viewed by 12888
Abstract
A remote sensing technique was developed to detect citrus canker in laboratory conditions and was verified in the grove by utilizing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In the laboratory, a hyperspectral (400–1000 nm) imaging system was utilized for the detection of citrus canker [...] Read more.
A remote sensing technique was developed to detect citrus canker in laboratory conditions and was verified in the grove by utilizing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In the laboratory, a hyperspectral (400–1000 nm) imaging system was utilized for the detection of citrus canker in several disease development stages (i.e., asymptomatic, early, and late symptoms) on Sugar Belle leaves and immature (green) fruit by using two classification methods: (i) radial basis function (RBF) and (ii) K nearest neighbor (KNN). The same imaging system mounted on an UAV was used to detect citrus canker on tree canopies in the orchard. The overall classification accuracy of the RBF was higher (94%, 96%, and 100%) than the KNN method (94%, 95%, and 96%) for detecting canker in leaves. Among the 31 studied vegetation indices, the water index (WI) and the Modified Chlorophyll Absorption in Reflectance Index (ARI and TCARI 1) more accurately detected canker in laboratory and in orchard conditions, respectively. Immature fruit was not a reliable tissue for early detection of canker. However, the proposed technique successfully distinguished the late stage canker-infected fruit with 92% classification accuracy. The UAV-based technique achieved 100% classification accuracy for identifying healthy and canker-infected trees. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Remote Sensing in Agriculture and Vegetation)
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21 pages, 20620 KiB  
Article
TopoLAP: Topology Recovery for Building Reconstruction by Deducing the Relationships between Linear and Planar Primitives
by Xinyi Liu, Yongjun Zhang, Xiao Ling, Yi Wan, Linyu Liu and Qian Li
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1372; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111372 - 8 Jun 2019
Cited by 30 | Viewed by 4805
Abstract
Limited by the noise, missing data and varying sampling density of the point clouds, planar primitives are prone to be lost during plane segmentation, leading to topology errors when reconstructing complex building models. In this paper, a pipeline to recover the broken topology [...] Read more.
Limited by the noise, missing data and varying sampling density of the point clouds, planar primitives are prone to be lost during plane segmentation, leading to topology errors when reconstructing complex building models. In this paper, a pipeline to recover the broken topology of planar primitives (TopoLAP) is proposed to reconstruct level of details 3 (LoD3) models. Firstly, planar primitives are segmented from the incomplete point clouds and feature lines are detected both from point clouds and images. Secondly, the structural contours of each plane segment are reconstructed by subset selection from intersections of these feature lines. Subsequently, missing planes are recovered by plane deduction according to the relationships between linear and planar primitives. Finally, the manifold and watertight polyhedral building models are reconstructed based on the optimized PolyFit framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline can handle partial incomplete point clouds and reconstruct the LoD3 models of complex buildings automatically. A comparative analysis indicates that the proposed method performs better to preserve sharp edges and achieves a higher fitness and correction rate than rooftop-based modeling and the original PolyFit algorithm. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Urban Remote Sensing)
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22 pages, 6064 KiB  
Article
Estimation of Rice Growth Parameters Based on Linear Mixed-Effect Model Using Multispectral Images from Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
by Yanyu Wang, Ke Zhang, Chunlan Tang, Qiang Cao, Yongchao Tian, Yan Zhu, Weixing Cao and Xiaojun Liu
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1371; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111371 - 8 Jun 2019
Cited by 56 | Viewed by 6148
Abstract
The accurate estimation of aboveground biomass (AGB) and leaf area index (LAI) is critical to characterize crop growth status and predict grain yield. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) -based remote sensing has attracted significant interest due to its high flexibility and easiness of operation. [...] Read more.
The accurate estimation of aboveground biomass (AGB) and leaf area index (LAI) is critical to characterize crop growth status and predict grain yield. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) -based remote sensing has attracted significant interest due to its high flexibility and easiness of operation. The mixed effect model introduced in this study can capture secondary factors that cannot be captured by standard empirical relationships. The objective of this study was to explore the potential benefit of using a linear mixed-effect (LME) model and multispectral images from a fixed-wing UAV to estimate both AGB and LAI of rice. Field experiments were conducted over two consecutive years (2017–2018), that involved different N rates, planting patterns and rice cultivars. Images were collected by a compact multispectral camera mounted on a fixed-wing UAV during key rice growth stages. LME, simple regression (SR), artificial neural networks (ANN) and random forests (RF) models were developed relating growth parameters (AGB and LAI) to spectral information. Cultivar (C), growth stage (S) and planting pattern (P) were selected as candidates of random effects for the LME models due to their significant effects on rice growth. Compared to other regression models (SR, ANN and RF), the LME model improved the AGB estimation accuracy for all stage groups to varying degrees: the R2 increased by 0.14–0.35 and the RMSE decreased by 0.88–1.80 t ha−1 for the whole season, the R2 increased by 0.07–0.15 and the RMSE decreased by 0.31–0.61 t ha−1 for pre-heading stages and the R2 increased by 0.21–0.53 and the RMSE decreased by 0.72–1.52 t ha−1 for post-heading stages. Further analysis suggested that the LME model also successfully predicted within the groups when the number of groups was suitable. More importantly, depending on the availability of C, S, P or combinations thereof, mixed effects could lead to an outperformance of baseline retrieval methods (SR, ANN or RF) due to the inclusion of secondary effects. Satisfactory results were also obtained for the LAI estimation while the superiority of the LME model was not as significant as that for AGB estimation. This study demonstrates that the LME model could accurately estimate rice AGB and LAI and fixed-wing UAVs are promising for the monitoring of the crop growth status over large-scale farmland. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Remote Sensing in Agriculture and Vegetation)
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20 pages, 5552 KiB  
Article
Sub-Pixel Crop Type Classification Using PROBA-V 100 m NDVI Time Series and Reference Data from Sentinel-2 Classifications
by Petar Dimitrov, Qinghan Dong, Herman Eerens, Alexander Gikov, Lachezar Filchev, Eugenia Roumenina and Georgi Jelev
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1370; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111370 - 7 Jun 2019
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 4795
Abstract
This paper presents the results of a sub-pixel classification of crop types in Bulgaria from PROBA-V 100 m normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series. Two sub-pixel classification methods, artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector regression (SVR) were used where the output [...] Read more.
This paper presents the results of a sub-pixel classification of crop types in Bulgaria from PROBA-V 100 m normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series. Two sub-pixel classification methods, artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector regression (SVR) were used where the output was a set of area fraction images (AFIs) at 100 m resolution with pixels containing estimated area fractions of each class. High-resolution maps of two test sites derived from Sentinel-2 classifications were used to obtain training data for the sub-pixel classifications. The estimated area fractions have a good correspondence with the true area fractions when aggregated to regions of 10 × 10 km2, especially when the SVR method was used. For the five dominant classes in the test sites the R2 obtained after the aggregation was 86% (winter cereals), 81% (sunflower), 92% (broad-leaved forest), 89% (maize), and 67% (grasslands) when the SVR method was used. Full article
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23 pages, 2284 KiB  
Article
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Using Generative Adversarial Networks for Semantic Segmentation of Aerial Images
by Bilel Benjdira, Yakoub Bazi, Anis Koubaa and Kais Ouni
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1369; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111369 - 7 Jun 2019
Cited by 180 | Viewed by 10945
Abstract
Segmenting aerial images is of great potential in surveillance and scene understanding of urban areas. It provides a mean for automatic reporting of the different events that happen in inhabited areas. This remarkably promotes public safety and traffic management applications. After the wide [...] Read more.
Segmenting aerial images is of great potential in surveillance and scene understanding of urban areas. It provides a mean for automatic reporting of the different events that happen in inhabited areas. This remarkably promotes public safety and traffic management applications. After the wide adoption of convolutional neural networks methods, the accuracy of semantic segmentation algorithms could easily surpass 80% if a robust dataset is provided. Despite this success, the deployment of a pretrained segmentation model to survey a new city that is not included in the training set significantly decreases accuracy. This is due to the domain shift between the source dataset on which the model is trained and the new target domain of the new city images. In this paper, we address this issue and consider the challenge of domain adaptation in semantic segmentation of aerial images. We designed an algorithm that reduces the domain shift impact using generative adversarial networks (GANs). In the experiments, we tested the proposed methodology on the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) semantic segmentation dataset and found that our method improves overall accuracy from 35% to 52% when passing from the Potsdam domain (considered as source domain) to the Vaihingen domain (considered as target domain). In addition, the method allows efficiently recovering the inverted classes due to sensor variation. In particular, it improves the average segmentation accuracy of the inverted classes due to sensor variation from 14% to 61%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Convolutional Neural Networks Applications in Remote Sensing)
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20 pages, 6367 KiB  
Article
Determining the Boundary and Probability of Surface Urban Heat Island Footprint Based on a Logistic Model
by Zhi Qiao, Chen Wu, Dongqi Zhao, Xinliang Xu, Jilin Yang, Li Feng, Zongyao Sun and Luo Liu
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1368; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111368 - 6 Jun 2019
Cited by 73 | Viewed by 5150
Abstract
Studies of the spatial extent of surface urban heat island (SUHI or UHISurf) effects require precise determination of the footprint (FP) boundary. Currently available methods overestimate or underestimate the SUHI FP boundary, and can even alter its morphology, due to theoretical [...] Read more.
Studies of the spatial extent of surface urban heat island (SUHI or UHISurf) effects require precise determination of the footprint (FP) boundary. Currently available methods overestimate or underestimate the SUHI FP boundary, and can even alter its morphology, due to theoretical limitations on the ability of their algorithms to accurately determine the impacts of the shape, topography, and landscape heterogeneity of the city. The key to determining the FP boundary is identifying background temperatures in reference rural regions. Due to the instability of remote sensing data, these background temperatures should be determined automatically rather than manually, to eliminate artificial bias. To address this need, we developed an algorithm that adequately represents the decay of land surface temperature (LST) from the urban center to surrounding rural regions, and automatically calculates thresholds for reference rural LSTs in all directions based on a logistic curve. In this study, we applied this algorithm with data from the Aqua Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (Aqua/MODIS) 8-day level 3 (L3) LST global grid product to delineate precise SUHI FPs for the Beijing metropolitan area during the summers of 2004–2018 and determine the interannual and diurnal variations in FP boundaries and their relationship with SUHI intensity. Full article
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21 pages, 1476 KiB  
Article
Sensitivity Analysis Method for Spectral Band Adjustment between Hyperspectral Sensors: A Case Study Using the CLARREO Pathfinder and HISUI
by Kenta Obata
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1367; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111367 - 6 Jun 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3514
Abstract
The International Space Station has become the platform for deploying hyperspectral sensors covering the solar reflective spectral range for earth observation. Intercalibration of hyperspectral sensors plays a crucial role in evaluating/improving radiometric consistency. When intercalibrating between hyperspectral sensors, spectral band adjustment is required [...] Read more.
The International Space Station has become the platform for deploying hyperspectral sensors covering the solar reflective spectral range for earth observation. Intercalibration of hyperspectral sensors plays a crucial role in evaluating/improving radiometric consistency. When intercalibrating between hyperspectral sensors, spectral band adjustment is required to mitigate the effects of differences between the relative spectral responses (RSRs) of the sensors. Errors in spectral parameters used in spectral band adjustment are propagated through to the adjustment results. The present study analytically approximated the uncertainty in the spectral band adjustment for evaluating the relative contributions of uncertainties in parameters associated with the exo-atmosphere, atmosphere, and surface to the total uncertainty. Numerical simulations using the derived equations were conducted to perform a sensitivity analysis for the case of the spectral band adjustment between the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) Pathfinder (CPF) and the Hyperspectral Imager Suite (HISUI). The results show that the effects of errors in the solar irradiance were greater than those of other sources of error, indicating that accurate estimates of atmospheric reflectances and tranismittances are not needed for spectral band adjustment between CPF and HISUI in the atmospheric windows. The accuracy of the analytical approximation was also evaluated in the simulations. The framework of the sensitivity analysis is applicable to other pairs of hyperspectral sensors. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Calibration/Validation of Hyperspectral Imagery)
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23 pages, 3874 KiB  
Article
Reconstruction of Ocean Color Data Using Machine Learning Techniques in Polar Regions: Focusing on Off Cape Hallett, Ross Sea
by Jinku Park, Jeong-Hoon Kim, Hyun-cheol Kim, Bong-Kuk Kim, Dukwon Bae, Young-Heon Jo, Naeun Jo and Sang Heon Lee
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1366; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111366 - 6 Jun 2019
Cited by 29 | Viewed by 4750
Abstract
The most problematic issue in the ocean color application is the presence of heavy clouds, especially in polar regions. For that reason, the demand for the ocean color application in polar regions is increased. As a way to overcome such issues, we conducted [...] Read more.
The most problematic issue in the ocean color application is the presence of heavy clouds, especially in polar regions. For that reason, the demand for the ocean color application in polar regions is increased. As a way to overcome such issues, we conducted the reconstruction of the chlorophyll-a concentration (CHL) data using the machine learning-based models to raise the usability of CHL data. This analysis was first conducted on a regional scale and focused on the biologically-valued Cape Hallett, Ross Sea, Antarctica. Environmental factors and geographical information associated with phytoplankton dynamics were considered as predictors for the CHL reconstruction, which were obtained from cloud-free microwave and reanalysis data. As the machine learning models used in the present study, the ensemble-based models such as Random forest (RF) and Extremely randomized tree (ET) were selected with 10-fold cross-validation. As a result, both CHL reconstructions from the two models showed significant agreement with the standard satellite-derived CHL data. In addition, the reconstructed CHLs were close to the actual CHL value even where it was not observed by the satellites. However, there is a slight difference between the CHL reconstruction results from the RF and the ET, which is likely caused by the difference in the contribution of each predictor. In addition, we examined the variable importance for the CHL reconstruction quantitatively. As such, the sea surface and atmospheric temperature, and the photosynthetically available radiation have high contributions to the model developments. Mostly, geographic information appears to have a lower contribution relative to environmental predictors. Lastly, we estimated the partial dependences for the predictors for further study on the variable contribution and investigated the contributions to the CHL reconstruction with changes in the predictors. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Ocean Remote Sensing)
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17 pages, 3481 KiB  
Article
Four-band Thermal Mosaicking: A New Method to Process Infrared Thermal Imagery of Urban Landscapes from UAV Flights
by Yichen Yang and Xuhui Lee
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(11), 1365; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11111365 - 6 Jun 2019
Cited by 25 | Viewed by 7191
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) support a large array of technological applications and scientific studies due to their ability to collect high-resolution image data. The processing of UAV data requires the use of mosaicking technology, such as structure-from-motion, which combines multiple photos to form [...] Read more.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) support a large array of technological applications and scientific studies due to their ability to collect high-resolution image data. The processing of UAV data requires the use of mosaicking technology, such as structure-from-motion, which combines multiple photos to form a single image mosaic and to construct a 3-D digital model of the measurement target. However, the mosaicking of thermal images is challenging due to low lens resolution and weak contrast in the single thermal band. In this study, a novel method, referred to as four-band thermal mosaicking (FTM), was developed in order to process thermal images. The method stacks the thermal band obtained by a thermal camera onto the RGB bands acquired on the same flight by an RGB camera and mosaics the four bands simultaneously. An object-based calibration method is then used to eliminate inter-band positional errors. A UAV flight over a natural park was carried out in order to test the method. The results demonstrated that with the assistance of the high-resolution RGB bands, the method enabled successful and efficient thermal mosaicking. Transect analysis revealed an inter-band accuracy of 0.39 m or 0.68 times the ground pixel size of the thermal camera. A cluster analysis validated that the thermal mosaic captured the expected contrast of thermal properties between different surfaces within the scene. Full article
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