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

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 23245

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Mingshu Wang

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Guest Editor

School of Geographical & Earth Sciences, College of Science & Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Interests: GIScience; geodata science; urban Informatics; city and regional development
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Claudio Persello

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Guest Editor

Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente, Department of Earth Observation Science, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
Interests: remote sensing; machine learning; deep learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Cities are not only the sites of many of the problems plaguing mankind, they also happen to be the birthplace of a great many solutions to these issues. The recent advances in remote sensing (e.g. very high-resolution imagery, LiDAR, video cameras, unmanned vehicle systems) have propelled waves of methodological and application innovations that have benefitted the urban remote sensing community. Meanwhile, the emerging transdisciplinary field of urban informatics produces and applies information and communication technology in the urban context. Urban informatics is geodata-intensive, which is usually beyond traditional GIS layers and often includes other open governmental data or firm/user-generated contents (e.g., volunteered geographical information), and sensor data (e.g., IoTs). Clearly, there is enormous potential in research synergy by integrating remote sensing and urban informatics.

Therefore, this Special Issue aims to advance theories, methods, and applications in order to produce new knowledge and integrate in remote sensing with urban informatics. We anticipate studies including but not limited to the development and application of frameworks of remote sensing and urban informatics integration, geodata collection and management practices in remote sensing and urban informatics integration, applications of big geodata to study urban dynamics, socio-economic variabilities, and urban resilience to climate change.

Dr. Mingshu Wang
Dr. Claudio Persello
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

urban remote sensing
urban informatics
smart cities
urban science
machine learning
deep learning
geodata science
multisensor data fusion and integration

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

18 pages, 1250 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Achieving High Reliability in Data Acquisition

by Ivan Šećerov, Srđan Popov, Srđan Sladojević, Dragana Milin, Lazar Lazić, Dragan Milošević, Daniela Arsenović and Stevan Savić

Remote Sens. 2021, 13(3), 345; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13030345 - 20 Jan 2021

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2876

Abstract

An urban environment defines a specific micro-climate which directly affects the quality of life in urbanized areas and often has a negative impact on urban populations. Phenomena like urban heat and surface heat islands are direct products of an urban lifestyle. Urban meteorological networks (UMNs) are a tool that can help to better understand and analyze the current situation and make the right decisions about future urban development. Deployed to monitor and record different objects and their states inside urban areas, UMNs build a long-term meteorological data time series database. The most commonly used systems for achieving this goal include wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper presents a combined experience in deploying three different WSN systems. During seven years of research in this field, the authors have recognized the importance of data reliability in data acquisition. More importantly, due to the lack of research addressing the reliability of the data received from WSNs by the core segment of the server (processes used in receiving, validating, parsing, and storing data into a database instance), the received data are used in scientific studies without questioning their reliability. To determine the possibility of shifting information provided by the data measured from sensor networks before it is stored in a desired form of database, this paper proposes a highly reliable socket server model. The model is built with high reliability and performance in mind and it includes three major processes, which use a combination of signals and control messages to pass information about their states. A case study is performed using high-end hardware, running a Linux operating system stressed to its limits. Repetition testing revealed inconsistency in the information provided by the operating system to the application layer, which could lead to the loss of information about short-term and rarely occurring monitored objects. The results lead to the conclusion that there is a clear need for a higher level of data reliability in the process of data acquisition by UMNs. The proposed socket server should fill this gap within the server’s core segment. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrating Remote Sensing and Urban Informatics)

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23 pages, 6918 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Investigating the Uncertainties Propagation Analysis of CO₂ Emissions Gridded Maps at the Urban Scale: A Case Study of Jinjiang City, China

by Shaoqing Dai, Yin Ren, Shudi Zuo, Chengyi Lai, Jiajia Li, Shengyu Xie and Bingchu Chen

Remote Sens. 2020, 12(23), 3932; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12233932 - 30 Nov 2020

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3462

Abstract

Gridded CO₂ emission maps at the urban scale can aid the design of low-carbon development strategies. However, the large uncertainties associated with such maps increase policy-related risks. Therefore, an investigation of the uncertainties in gridded maps at the urban scale is essential. This study proposed an analytic workflow to assess uncertainty propagation during the gridding process. Gridded CO₂ emission maps were produced using two resolutions of geospatial datasets (e.g., remote sensing satellite-derived products) for Jinjiang City, China, and a workflow was applied to analyze uncertainties. The workflow involved four submodules that can be used to evaluate the uncertainties of CO₂ emissions in gridded maps, caused by the gridded model and input. Fine-resolution (30 m) maps have a larger spatial variation in CO₂ emissions, which gives the fine-resolution maps a higher degree of uncertainty propagation. Furthermore, the uncertainties of gridded CO₂ emission maps, caused by inserting a random error into spatial proxies, were found to decrease after the gridding process. This can be explained by the “compensation of error” phenomenon, which may be attributed to the cancellation of the overestimated and underestimated values among the different sectors at the same grid. This indicates a nonlinear change between the sum of the uncertainties for different sectors and the actual uncertainties in the gridded maps. In conclusion, the present workflow determined uncertainties were caused by the gridded model and input. These results may aid decision-makers in establishing emission reduction targets, and in developing both low-carbon cities and community policies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrating Remote Sensing and Urban Informatics)

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19 pages, 2828 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Influence of Urban Scale and Urban Expansion on the Urban Heat Island Effect in Metropolitan Areas: Case Study of Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Urban Agglomeration

by Mingxing Chen, Yuan Zhou, Maogui Hu and Yaliu Zhou

Remote Sens. 2020, 12(21), 3491; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12213491 - 23 Oct 2020

Cited by 52 | Viewed by 6113

Abstract

Global large-scale urbanization has a deep impact on climate change and has brought great challenges to sustainable development, especially in urban agglomerations. At present, there is still a lack of research on the quantitative assessment of the relationship between urban scale and urban expansion and the degree of the urban heat island (UHI) effect, as well as a discussion on mitigation and adaptation of the UHI effect from the perspective of planning. This paper analyzes the regional urbanization process, average surface temperature variation characteristics, surface urban heat island (SUHI), which reflects the intensity of UHI, and the relationship between urban expansion, urban scale, and the UHI in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH) urban agglomeration using multi-source analysis of data from 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015. The results show that the UHI effect in the study area was significant. The average surface temperature of central areas was the highest, and decreased from central areas to suburbs in the order of central areas > expanding areas > rural residential areas. From the perspective of spatial distribution, in Beijing, the southern part of the study area, the junction of Tianjin, Langfang, and Cangzhou are areas with intense SUHI. The scale and pace of expansion of urban land in Beijing were more than in other cities, the influencing range of SUHI in Beijing increased obviously, and the SUHI of central areas was most intense. The results indicate that due to the larger urban scale of the BTH urban agglomeration, it will face a greater UHI effect. The UHI effect was also more significant in areas of dense distribution in cities within the urban agglomeration. Based on results and existing research, planning suggestions are proposed for central areas with regard to expanding urban areas and suburbs to alleviate the urban heat island effect and improve the resilience of cities to climate change. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrating Remote Sensing and Urban Informatics)

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25 pages, 11651 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Identification of Urban Functional Areas by Coupling Satellite Images and Taxi GPS Trajectories

by Zhen Qian, Xintao Liu, Fei Tao and Tong Zhou

Remote Sens. 2020, 12(15), 2449; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12152449 - 30 Jul 2020

Cited by 44 | Viewed by 5179

Abstract

Urban functional area (UFA) recognition is one of the most important strategies for achieving sustainable city development. As remote-sensing and social-sensing data sources have increasingly become available, UFA recognition has received a significant amount of attention. Research on UFA recognition that uses a single dataset suffers from a low update frequency or low spatial resolution, while data fusion-based methods are limited in efficiency and accuracy. This paper proposes an integrated model to identify UFA using satellite images and taxi global positioning system (GPS) trajectories in four steps. First, blocks were generated as spatial units in the study area, and the spatiotemporal information entropy of the taxi GPS trajectory (STET) for each block was calculated. Second, a 24-hour time-frequency series was formed based on the pick-up and drop-off points extracted from taxi trajectories and used as the interpretation indicator of the blocks. The K-Means++ and k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) algorithm were used to identify their social functions. Third, a multilabel classification method based on the residual neural network (MLC-ResNets) and “You Only Look Once” (YOLO) target detection algorithms were used to identify the features of the typical and atypical spatial textures, respectively, of the satellite images in the blocks. The confidence scores of the features of the blocks were categorized by the decision tree algorithm. Fourth, to find the best way to integrate the two sub-models for UFA identification, the 10-fold cross-validation method based on stratified random sampling was applied to determine the most optimal STET thresholds. The results showed that the average accuracy reached 82.0%, with an average kappa of 73.5%—significant improvements over most existing studies. This paper provides new insights into how the advantages of satellite images and taxi trajectories in UFA identification can be fully exploited to support sustainable city management. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrating Remote Sensing and Urban Informatics)

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20 pages, 5616 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Geo-Location Algorithm for Building Targets in Oblique Remote Sensing Images Based on Deep Learning and Height Estimation

by Yiming Cai, Yalin Ding, Hongwen Zhang, Jihong Xiu and Zhiming Liu

Remote Sens. 2020, 12(15), 2427; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12152427 - 29 Jul 2020

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 4293

Abstract

To improve the accuracy of the geographic positioning of a single aerial remote sensing image, the height information of a building in the image must be considered. Oblique remote sensing images are essentially two-dimensional images and produce a large positioning error if a traditional positioning algorithm is used to locate the building directly. To address this problem, this study uses a convolutional neural network to automatically detect the location of buildings in remote sensing images. Moreover, it optimizes an automatic building recognition algorithm for oblique aerial remote sensing images based on You Only Look Once V4 (YOLO V4). This study also proposes a positioning algorithm for the building target, which uses the imaging angle to estimate the height of a building, and combines the spatial coordinate transformation matrix to calculate high-accuracy geo-location of target buildings. Simulation analysis shows that the traditional positioning algorithm inevitably leads to large errors in the positioning of building targets. When the target height is 50 m and the imaging angle is 70°, the positioning error is 114.89 m. Flight tests show that the algorithm established in this study can improve the positioning accuracy of building targets by approximately 20%–50% depending on the difference in target height. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Integrating Remote Sensing and Urban Informatics)

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