Remote Sensing, Volume 9, Issue 4

Aerosol optical depth (AOD) has been widely used in climate research, atmospheric environmental observations, and other applications. However, high AOD retrieval remains challenging over heavily polluted regions, such as the North China Plain (NCP)....

Determining the soil moisture in agricultural fields is a significant parameter to use irrigation systems efficiently. In contrast to standard soil moisture measurements, good results might be acquired in a shorter time over large areas by remote sen...

Accurate, spatially explicit information about forest canopy fuel properties is essential for ecosystem management strategies for reducing the severity of forest fires. Airborne LiDAR technology has demonstrated its ability to accurately map canopy f...

Structure from motion (SfM) and MultiView Stereo (MVS) algorithms are increasingly being applied to imagery from unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to generate point cloud data for various surveying and mapping applications. To date, the options for ass...

Pan-sharpening aims to sharpen a low spatial resolution multispectral (MS) image by combining the spatial detail information extracted from a panchromatic (PAN) image. An effective pan-sharpening method should produce a high spatial resolution MS ima...

Plant primary production is a key driver of several ecosystem functions in seasonal marshes, such as water purification and secondary production by wildlife and domestic animals. Knowledge of the spatio-temporal dynamics of biomass production is ther...

Natural lagoons and estuaries worldwide are experiencing accelerated ecosystem degradation due to increased anthropogenic pressure. As a key driver of coastal zone dynamics, suspended sediment concentration (SSC) is difficult to monitor with adequate...

In this research, a semi-automated building damage detection system is addressed under the umbrella of high-spatial resolution remotely sensed images. The aim of this study was to develop a semi-automated fuzzy decision making system using Genetic Al...

Surge-type glaciers are characterised by relatively short phases of enhanced ice transport and mass redistribution after a comparatively long quiescent phase when the glacier is virtually inactive. This unstable behaviour makes it difficult to assess...

SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) imaging plays a central role in Remote Sensing due to, among other important features, its ability to provide high-resolution, day-and-night and almost weather-independent images. SAR images are affected from a granular...

Actual evapotranspiration (ET) is a major water use flux in a basin water balance with crucial significance for water resources management and planning. Mapping ET with good accuracy has been the subject of ongoing research. Such mapping is even more...

In the Beijing plain, the long-term groundwater overexploitation, exploitation, and the utilization of superficial urban space have led to land subsidence. In this study, the spatial–temporal analysis of land subsidence in Beijing was assessed by usi...

To optimize the efficiency of the geospatial service in the flood response decision making system, a Parallel Agent-as-a-Service (P-AaaS) method is proposed and implemented in the cloud. The prototype system and comparisons demonstrate the advantages...

This paper presents a novel semi-supervised joint dictionary learning (S²JDL) algorithm for hyperspectral image classification. The algorithm jointly minimizes the reconstruction and classification error by optimizing a semi-supervised dictionary lea...

Soil moisture (SM) retrieval from SMOS (the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission) and SMAP (the Soil Moisture Active/Passive mission) passive microwave data over forested areas with required accuracy is of great significance and poses some challe...

The construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam began in 2011, resulting in rapidly increased population from less than 80,000 persons before 2010 to more than 150,000 persons in 2012 in Altamira, Pará State, Brazil. This rapid urbanization has...

Sound navigating and ranging (SONAR) detection systems can provide valuable information for navigation and security, especially in shallow coastal areas. The last few years have seen an important increase in the volume of bathymetric data produced by...

Forty-six ancient Tibetan star-shaped towers and a village are located on a giant slope, which would be partially flooded by a nearby reservoir currently under construction. Ground survey, boreholes, and geophysical investigations have been carried o...

Many cities in the Global South are facing rapid population and slum growth, but lack detailed information to target these issues. Frequently, municipal datasets on such areas do not keep up with such dynamics, with data that are incomplete, inconsis...

A LiDAR-based high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) system was developed for cotton plant phenotyping in the field. The HTP system consists of a 2D LiDAR and an RTK-GPS mounted on a high clearance tractor. The LiDAR scanned three rows of cotton plots sim...

The Ultra-Violet Aerosol Index (UVAI) is a practical parameter for detecting aerosols that absorb UV radiation, especially where other aerosol retrievals fail, such as over bright surfaces (e.g., deserts and clouds). However, typical UVAI retrieval r...

The optical backscattering from particles in the ocean is an important quantity that has been measured by remote sensing techniques and in situ instruments. In this paper, we compare estimates of this quantity from airborne lidar with those from an i...

Target classification techniques using spectral imagery and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) are widely used in many disciplines. However, none of the existing methods can directly capture spectral and 3D spatial information simultaneously. Multis...

Impervious surface area (ISA) is an important parameter for many studies such as urban climate, urban environmental change, and air pollution; however, mapping ISA at the regional or global scale is still challenging due to the complexity of impervio...

Buried archeological features show up as crop marks that are mostly visible using high-resolution image data. Such data are costly and restricted to small regions and time domains. However, a time series of freely available medium resolution imagery...

Recent years have witnessed the fast development of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). As an alternative to traditional image acquisition methods, UAVs bridge the gap between terrestrial and airborne photogrammetry and enable flexible acquisition of hi...

It is not yet clear whether there is any difference in using remote sensing data of different spatial resolutions and filtering methods to improve the above-ground biomass (AGB) estimation accuracy of alpine meadow grassland. In this study, field mea...

Leaf area index (LAI) and fraction of photosynthetically active radiation (FPAR) absorbed by vegetation are key variables in many global models of climate, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and ecology. These parameters are being operationally produced fro...

Spaceborne Multi-Temporal Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry (MT-InSAR) has been a valuable tool in mapping motion phenomena in different scenarios. Recently, the capabilities of MT-InSAR for risk monitoring and preventive analysis of heri...

Urban villages (UVs), the main settlements of rural migrant workers and low-income groups in metropolitan areas of China, have become of major concern to city managers and researchers due to the rapid urbanization in recent years. A clear understandi...

Synoptic monitoring of estuaries, some of the most bio-diverse and productive environments on Earth, is essential to study small-scale water dynamics and its role on spatiotemporal variation in water quality important to indigenous marine species and...

Understanding and monitoring the environmental impacts of global urbanization requires better urban datasets. Continuous field impervious surface change (ISC) mapping using Landsat data is an effective way to quantify spatiotemporal dynamics of urban...

Like computer vision before, remote sensing has been radically changed by the introduction of deep learning and, more notably, Convolution Neural Networks. Land cover classification, object detection and scene understanding in aerial images rely more...

The new IMERG and GSMaP-v6 satellite rainfall estimation (SRE) products from the Global Precipitation Monitoring (GPM) mission have been available since January 2015. With a finer grid box of 0.1°, these products should provide more detailed informat...

Directional spreading function of the gravity-capillary wave spectrum can provide the high-wavenumber wave energy distribution among different directions on the sea surface. The existing directional spreading functions have been mainly developed for...

Satellite remote sensing data including Landsat-8 (optical), Sentinel-1, and RADARSAT-2 (synthetic aperture radar (SAR) missions) have recently become routinely available for large scale ice velocity mapping of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica....

This work describes the first global scale assessment of a Global Navigation Satellite Systems Reflectometry (GNSS-R) experiment performed on-board the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission for soil moisture and biomass determination. Scattered...

This paper discusses the potential and limitations of high-resolution P-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (PolInSAR) in underlying topography estimation over forest areas. Time-frequency (TF) analysis in the azimuth dire...

Subpixel mapping (SPM) is a technique that produces hard classification maps at a spatial resolution finer than that of the input images produced when handling mixed pixels. Existing spatial attraction model (SAM) techniques have been proven to be an...

Citizen Science (CS) and crowdsourcing are two potentially valuable sources of data for Earth Observation (EO), which have yet to be fully exploited. Research in this area has increased rapidly during the last two decades, and there are now many exam...

This study presents the development of a semi-automated processing chain for urban object-based land-cover and land-use classification. The processing chain is implemented in Python and relies on existing open-source software GRASS GIS and R. The com...

Identifying the optimal structure of terrain dependent Rational Function Models (RFMs) not only decreases the number of Ground Control Points (GCPs) required, but also increases the accuracy of the model, by reducing the multi-collinearity of Rationa...

Change detection is one of the main applications in earth observation but currently there are only a few approaches based on radar imagery. Available techniques strongly focus on optical data. These techniques are often limited to static analyses of...

Remote sensing of the structural and spectral traits of vegetation is being transformed by structure from motion (SFM) algorithms that combine overlapping images to produce three-dimensional (3D) red-green-blue (RGB) point clouds. However, much remai...

Correction of terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) intensity data has been increasingly studied in recent years. The purpose is to obtain additional insight into the scanned environment that is not available from the geometric information...

The identification and representation of building roof topology are basic, but important, issues for 3D building model reconstruction from point clouds. Always, the roof topology is expressed by the roof topology graph (RTG), which stores the plane–p...

The Tsaoling Landslide in Taiwan has captured attentions of researchers worldwide due to its frequent catastrophic failure and distinctive features. Thanks to the launch of TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X (TSX/TDX) constellation, retrieval of global DEM with hig...

The response of an ecosystem to external drivers may not always be gradual and reversible. Discontinuous and sometimes irreversible changes, called ‘regime shifts’ or ‘critical transitions’, can occur. The likelihood of such shifts is expected to inc...

We present preliminary results of an Earth observation approach for the study of past human occupation and landscape reconstruction in the Central Sahara. This region includes a variety of geomorphological features such as palaeo-oases, dried river b...

Airborne laser scanning is now widely used for forest inventories. An essential part of inventory is a collection of field reference data including measurements of tree stem diameter at breast height (DBH). Traditionally this is acquired through manu...