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Global Monitoring of Inland Water Using Remote Sensing and Artificial Intelligence (Second Edition)

A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "AI Remote Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2026 | Viewed by 764

Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Architecture & Urban Planning, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
Interests: hydrology and coastal remote sensing; multi-source remote sensing data processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing 211100, China
Interests: remote sensing image processing; multimodal fusion; pansharpening; segmentation; object detection; foundation model
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China
Interests: computer communications (networks); programming languages; databases; remote sensing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Inland water bodies around the world, such as lakes, reservoirs, rivers, canals, and ponds, play a crucial role in sustaining life, providing human well-being, supporting ecosystems, and ensuring water security for millions of people worldwide. However, in recent years, these valuable resources have come under increasing pressure due to climate change, population growth, urbanization, and industrial activities. The ability to comprehensively monitor and assess the status and dynamics of inland water bodies (lakes, rivers, and reservoirs) at local to global scales using remote sensing has become a critical challenge for hydrological, ecological, and environmental researchers, managers, and policymakers.

Remote sensing and artificial intelligence (AI) have emerged as powerful tools for addressing the above-mentioned challenges. Remote sensing technologies, encompassing optical, thermal, radar, and lidar sensors aboard satellites and other platforms, enable the acquisition of frequent, synoptic, and multidimensional data across large geographic areas over long periods at a given revisit frequency. When coupled with widely used AI techniques, such as machine learning and deep learning, these remote sensing datasets can be efficiently processed and analyzed to extract and invert valuable information (e.g., water area, water level, water storage, water quality, and wetland area) from inland water bodies worldwide. In addition, the obtained water-related information can further support water resource monitoring, assessment, management, and policy making.

  • Global-scale inland water body mapping and monitoring by remote sensing;
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches for water body detection and classification;
  • Estimation of water quality parameters from remote sensing data;
  • Remote sensing and AI in monitoring wetland ecosystems;
  • Monitoring changes in lake and river hydrology;
  • Synergistic use of multisource remote sensing data for water resource assessment;
  • Fusion of multisource remote sensing data for inland water studies;
  • Integration of remote sensing and GIS in water resource management.

Dr. Nan Xu
Dr. Xin Li
Dr. Junfeng Xiong
Dr. Linyang Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • remote sensing
  • inland water
  • artificial intelligence
  • water resource
  • hydrology
  • machine learning
  • global change and regional response

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

21 pages, 6797 KB  
Article
MEF-TransUNet: A Newly Developed Remote Sensing Detection Model for Micro Water Body Targets
by Yongkang Yu, Sijia Li, Xingming Zheng, Kai Li and Jianhua Ren
Remote Sens. 2026, 18(10), 1611; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18101611 - 17 May 2026
Viewed by 405
Abstract
Micro water bodies are essential to regional ecosystems but are difficult to extract from high-resolution remote sensing images due to fragmentation and building shadows. To address edge breakage and high false-alarm rates in existing semantic segmentation models, this study proposes MEF-TransUNet, an improved [...] Read more.
Micro water bodies are essential to regional ecosystems but are difficult to extract from high-resolution remote sensing images due to fragmentation and building shadows. To address edge breakage and high false-alarm rates in existing semantic segmentation models, this study proposes MEF-TransUNet, an improved TransUNet-based model for fine micro water body extraction. The model integrates a multi-scale edge-guided attention module (MEGA), a high–low-frequency decomposition fusion module (HLFD), and a convolutional block attention module (CBAM). Specifically, MEGA extracts edge priors using a Laplacian pyramid to repair topological breaks in slender water bodies. HLFD uses frequency-domain decoupling to suppress high-frequency background noise and reduce confusion between water bodies and shadows. CBAM enhances channel and spatial feature attention. Experiments using PlanetScope images from the Songhuajiang River Basin in Daqing City of the Heilongjiang Province in China showed that MEF-TransUNet achieves 91.74% precision, a 90.07% F1-score, a recall of 90.22%, and a B-IoU of 43.88%. For the GID dataset, the model attains a precision of 91.85%, an F1-score of 91.48%, a recall of 92.01%, and a B-IoU of 55.42%. Its overall performance clearly outperforms DeepLabV3+, SegFormer, U-Net, AttenUNet, and UNet++, enabling accurate micro water body localization, high output purity, and reduced manual correction costs, thus supporting fine water resource management in complex surface environments. Full article
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