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Remote Sensing for Natural and Urban Scene Understanding and Applications

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

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2026 | Viewed by 2428

Special Issue Editors

School of Remote Sensing and Geomatics Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
Interests: point cloud registration; object recognition; point cloud segmentation; classification; urban reconstruction
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED), University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 94240, 1090 GE Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Interests: laser scanning; HD mapping; object recognition; semantic segmentation

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Guest Editor
School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing 210098, China
Interests: point cloud registration; object recognition; point cloud segmentation; classification

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Guest Editor
School of Remote Sensing and Geomatics Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
Interests: airborne laser scanning mapping for land-use/land-cover classification and 3D object modelling; algorithms and processing methodologies of digital images for 3D object modeling; multi-source and multi-intelligence data fusion for urban remote sensing; mobile laser scanning system for transportation infrastructure mapping; automatic feature extraction; target recognition and tracking
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Geomatics Engineering, College of Civil Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China
Interests: image-and LiDAR-based segmentation and reconstruction; full-waveform LiDAR data processing; related remote sensing applications in the field of forest ecosystems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, advancements in technologies such as laser scanning, unmanned aerial photogrammetry, and ubiquitous collection have facilitated the acquisition of geographic information. The spatial data obtained from these sources, both directly and indirectly, are becoming increasingly significant within geographic information science. Point clouds derived from diverse origins exhibit characteristics such as extensive feature sets, irregular spatial distributions, and cross-scale variations, posing challenges for efficient processing. Furthermore, the rapid advancement of intelligent processing technologies for spatial data (e.g., image, point cloud) necessitates addressing the characterization of multi-level features in point clouds, 3D information extraction and fusion, and on-demand structured representations. Consequently, constructing intelligent and effective processing methods for spatial data is important.

Significant advancements have been made in the intelligent processing technologies for spatial data: (1) Existing point cloud feature descriptors are primarily constructed using manually designed features and deep learning techniques; however, further research is necessary to enhance high-level feature descriptions. (2) Most methods mainly rely on feature descriptor-based and deep learning approaches for semantic extraction, so there is a need for improvements in both network architecture design and the quality of training samples for deep learning networks. (3) Current research focuses on LOD modeling and façade reconstruction of buildings. However, the intelligent understanding of point cloud scenes requires further development in high-level feature extraction to effectively interpret large-scale point cloud scenes.

This Special Issue primarily focuses on integrating methods such as artificial intelligence and deep learning to establish object-oriented deep learning networks for spatial data. It aims to achieve precise scene understanding for regional and individual objects through new methods and technologies. We hope to provide valuable technical references for this field and promote research on intelligent processing models and methods for 3D dense point clouds. Articles may cover, but are not limited to, the following subjects:

(1) Advanced algorithms for point cloud registration and alignment;

(2) Object extraction and classification techniques applicable to natural and urban environments;

(3) Three-dimensional modeling of urban scenes;

(4) Applications of intelligent processing in environmental monitoring and disaster management.

Dr. Yufu Zang
Dr. Jinhu Wang
Dr. Yueqian Shen
Prof. Dr. Haiyan Guan
Dr. Dong Chen
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-blind 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
  • point clouds
  • 3D scene understanding
  • object extraction
  • classification
  • environmental monitoring
  • urban planning

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

26 pages, 13313 KB  
Article
High-Precision River Network Mapping Using River Probability Learning and Adaptive Stream Burning
by Yufu Zang, Zhaocai Chu, Zhen Cui, Zhuokai Shi, Qihan Jiang, Yueqian Shen and Jue Ding
Remote Sens. 2026, 18(2), 362; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18020362 - 21 Jan 2026
Viewed by 487
Abstract
Accurate river network mapping is essential for hydrological modeling, flood risk assessment, and watershed environment management. However, conventional methods based on either optical imagery or digital elevation models (DEMs) often suffer from river network discontinuity and poor representation of morphologically complex rivers. To [...] Read more.
Accurate river network mapping is essential for hydrological modeling, flood risk assessment, and watershed environment management. However, conventional methods based on either optical imagery or digital elevation models (DEMs) often suffer from river network discontinuity and poor representation of morphologically complex rivers. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes a novel method integrating the river-oriented Gradient Boosting Tree model (RGBT) and adaptive stream burning algorithm for high-precision and topologically consistent river network extraction. Water-oriented multispectral indices and multi-scale linear geometric features are first fused and input for a river-oriented Gradient Boosting Tree model to generate river probability maps. A direction-constrained region growing strategy is then applied to derive spatially coherent river vectors. These vectors are finally integrated into a spatially adaptive stream burning algorithm to construct a conditional DEM for hydrological coherent river network extraction. We select eight representative regions with diverse topographical characteristics to evaluate the performance of our method. Quantitative comparisons against reference networks and mainstream hydrographic products demonstrate that the method achieves the highest positional accuracy and network continuity, with errors mainly focused within a 0–40 m range. Significant improvements are primarily for narrow tributaries, highly meandering rivers, and braided channels. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method provides a reliable solution for high-resolution river network mapping in complex environments. Full article
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21 pages, 8269 KB  
Article
Context-Aware Feature Adaptation for Mitigating Negative Transfer in 3D LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
by Lamiae El Mendili, Sylvie Daniel and Thierry Badard
Remote Sens. 2025, 17(16), 2825; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs17162825 - 14 Aug 2025
Viewed by 1316
Abstract
Semantic segmentation of 3D LiDAR point clouds is crucial for autonomous driving and urban modeling but requires extensive labeled data. Unsupervised domain adaptation from synthetic to real data offers a promising solution, yet faces the challenge of negative transfer, particularly due to context [...] Read more.
Semantic segmentation of 3D LiDAR point clouds is crucial for autonomous driving and urban modeling but requires extensive labeled data. Unsupervised domain adaptation from synthetic to real data offers a promising solution, yet faces the challenge of negative transfer, particularly due to context shifts between domains. This paper introduces Context-Aware Feature Adaptation, a novel approach to mitigate negative transfer in 3D unsupervised domain adaptation. The proposed approach disentangles object-specific and context-specific features, refines source context features through cross-attention with target information, and adaptively fuses the results. We evaluate our approach on challenging synthetic-to-real adaptation scenarios, demonstrating consistent improvements over state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods with up to 7.9% improvement in classes subject to context shift. Our comprehensive domain shift analysis reveals a positive correlation between context shift magnitude and performance improvement. Extensive ablation studies and visualizations further validate the efficacy in handling context shift for 3D semantic segmentation. Full article
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