In this paper, we discuss spatiotemporal data fusion methods in remote sensing. These methods fuse temporally sparse fine-resolution images with temporally dense coarse-resolution images. This review ...reveals that existing spatiotemporal data fusion methods are mainly dedicated to blending optical images. There is a limited number of studies focusing on fusing microwave data, or on fusing microwave and optical images in order to address the problem of gaps in the optical data caused by the presence of clouds. Therefore, future efforts are required to develop spatiotemporal data fusion methods flexible enough to accomplish different data fusion tasks under different environmental conditions and using different sensors data as input. The review shows that additional investigations are required to account for temporal changes occurring during the observation period when predicting spectral reflectance values at a fine scale in space and time. More sophisticated machine learning methods such as convolutional neural network (CNN) represent a promising solution for spatiotemporal fusion, especially due to their capability to fuse images with different spectral values.
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Spatial information regarding the arrangement of land cover objects plays an important role in distinguishing the land use types at land parcel or local neighborhood levels. This study investigates ...the use of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) in order to characterize spatial arrangement features for land use classification from high resolution remote sensing images, with particular interest in comparing land use classifications between different graph-based methods and between different remote sensing images. We examine three kinds of graph-based methods, i.e., feature engineering, graph kernels, and GCNs. Based upon the extracted arrangement features and features regarding the spatial composition of land cover objects, we formulated ten land use classifications. We tested those on two different remote sensing images, which were acquired from GaoFen-2 (with a spatial resolution of 0.8 m) and ZiYuan-3 (of 2.5 m) satellites in 2020 on Fuzhou City, China. Our results showed that land use classifications that are based on the arrangement features derived from GCNs achieved the highest classification accuracy than using graph kernels and handcrafted graph features for both images. We also found that the contribution to separating land use types by arrangement features varies between GaoFen-2 and ZiYuan-3 images, due to the difference in the spatial resolution. This study offers a set of approaches for effectively mapping land use types from (very) high resolution satellite images.
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Pan-sharpening methods are commonly used to synthesize multispectral and panchromatic images. Selecting an appropriate algorithm that maintains the spectral and spatial information content of input ...images is a challenging task. This review paper investigates a wide range of algorithms, including 41 methods. For this purpose, the methods were categorized as Component Substitution (CS-based), Multi-Resolution Analysis (MRA), Variational Optimization-based (VO), and Hybrid and were tested on a collection of 21 case studies. These include images from WorldView-2, 3 & 4, GeoEye-1, QuickBird, IKONOS, KompSat-2, KompSat-3A, TripleSat, Pleiades-1, Pleiades with the aerial platform, and Deimos-2. Neural network-based methods were excluded due to their substantial computational requirements for operational mapping purposes. The methods were evaluated based on four Spectral and three Spatial quality metrics. An Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA) was used to statistically compare the pan-sharpening categories. Results indicate that MRA-based methods performed better in terms of spectral quality, whereas most Hybrid-based methods had the highest spatial quality and CS-based methods had the lowest results both spectrally and spatially. The revisited version of the Additive Wavelet Luminance Proportional Pan-sharpening method had the highest spectral quality, whereas Generalized IHS with Best Trade-off Parameter with Additive Weights showed the highest spatial quality. CS-based methods generally had the fastest run-time, whereas the majority of methods belonging to MRA and VO categories had relatively long run times.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
•Supervised classifiers rely on time-consuming and expensive samples collection.•Crops training samples are automatically generated using Dynamic Time Warping.•Quality of resulting samples is ...improved using Random Forests proximity measure.•Proposed methodology works well in areas with balanced crop samples.
Crop type mapping is relevant to a wide range of food security applications. Supervised classification methods commonly generate these data from satellite image time-series. Yet, their successful implementation is hindered by the lack of training samples. Solutions like transfer learning, development of temporal-spectral signatures of the target classes, re-utilization of existing inventories, or crowdsourcing initiatives are commonly applied to generate samples for thematically coarser classifications. These methods are rarely used for generating crop types samples. In this study, we leverage the phenology information of existing data inventories using Time-Weighted Dynamic Time Warping (TWDTW) to address the problem of automatic crop sample generation in two target areas. Resulting labeled samples are refined using proximity measures obtained from Random Forests (RF). Sentinel-2 time-series are used to obtain phenology information from two study areas. The proposed methodology achieved promising results for classes with a reduced inter-classes similarity such as sugar beets (user’s accuracy, UA, of 98% and producer’s accuracy, PA, of 100%) or grains (UA of 98% and PA of 90%). The crops with a high inter-classes similarity yielded less satisfactory results. Potatoes, for example, obtained a high PA of 95%, but a UA of only 36% because of the spectral-temporal similarity with maize. The methodology works well for areas with balanced crop samples. Yet, it favors prevalent classes in areas with imbalanced crops at the expense of a low accuracy for the minority crops. Despite these shortcomings, the proposed methodology offers a viable option to generate crop samples in regions with few ground labels.
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The spatial distribution of water resources largely influences Earth ecosystems and human civilization. Being a major component of the global water cycle, evapotranspiration (ET) serves as an ...indicator of the availability of water resources. Understanding the actual ET (ETa) variation mechanism at different spatial and temporal scales can improve management of water use within the sustainable development limits. In this study, remote sensing derived ETa data were used to study water resource fluctuations in the Loess Plateau, China. This region covers diverse climate types from humid to arid and experienced large changes in vegetation cover during a revegetation project between 2000 and 2015. The relations between spatiotemporal variation of ETa, climate factors and vegetation change were explored using statistical methods. The results show that cropland, forestland and grassland take the largest percentage of total ETa. Total ETa exhibited a marginally increasing trend (p < 0.1) during 2000–2010 and no trend during 2011–2015. Windspeed and vegetation cover index highly influenced ETa, followed by atmospheric pressure, air humidity, precipitation, bright sunshine duration and temperature. Temperature has little effect on ETa throughout the Loess Plateau. The monitoring of water resources based upon water balance between precipitation, ETa and river flow changes shows that water consumption deficit is consistent with vegetation changes: it was large during 2000–2010 when vegetation increased rapidly and decreased after 2010. These results could help to develop different water saving strategies across the Loess Plateau and build a better monitoring system of water resources.
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•Actual evapotranspiration in the Loess Plateau is quantified and validated.•Windspeed is the dominant influential climate factor to actual evapotranspiration in research area.•Evapotranspiration variation is consistent with vegetation coverage change in the Loess Plateau.•Water deficit of the Loess Plateau fluctuated during revegetation period (2000–2015).
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•A multi-task network (BsiNet) is proposed to extract fields from high-resolution satellite images.•BsiNet has a flexible backbone structure that can be replaced by various state-of-the-art ...networks.•BsiNet performs better field delineation than ten variants and three existing methods.•BsiNet has a high potential to be used for different areas and sensors.
This paper presents a new multi-task neural network, called BsiNet, to delineate agricultural fields from high-resolution satellite images. BsiNet is modified from a Psi-Net by structuring three parallel decoders into a single encoder to improve computational efficiency. BsiNet learns three tasks: a core task for agricultural field identification and two auxiliary tasks for field boundary prediction and distance estimation, corresponding to mask, boundary, and distance tasks, respectively. A spatial group-wise enhancement module is incorporated to improve the identification of small fields. We conducted experiments on a GaoFen1 and three GaoFen2 satellite images collected in Xinjiang, Fujian, Shandong, and Sichuan provinces in China, and compared BsiNet with 13 different neural networks. Our results show that the agricultural fields extracted by BsiNet have the lowest global over-classification (GOC) of 0.062, global under-classification (GUC) of 0.042, and global total errors (GTC) of 0.062 for the Xinjiang dataset. For the Fujian dataset with irregular and complex fields, BsiNet outperformed the second-best method from the Xinjiang dataset analysis, yielding the lowest GTC of 0.291. It also produced satisfactory results on the Shandong and Sichuan datasets. Moreover, BsiNet has fewer parameters and faster computation than existing multi-task models (i.e., Psi-Net and ResUNet-a D7). We conclude that BsiNet can be used successfully in extracting agricultural fields from high-resolution satellite images and can be applied to different field settings.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Information about the location and extent of informal settlements is necessary to guide decision making and resource allocation for their upgrading. Very high resolution (VHR) satellite images can ...provide this useful information, however, different urban settlement types are hard to be automatically discriminated and extracted from VHR imagery, because of their abstract semantic class definition. State-of-the-art classification techniques rely on hand-engineering spatial-contextual features to improve the classification results of pixel-based methods. In this paper, we propose to use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for learning discriminative spatial features, and perform automatic detection of informal settlements. The experimental analysis is carried out on a QuickBird image acquired over Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The proposed technique is compared against support vector machines (SVMs) using texture features extracted from grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and local binary patterns (LBP), which result in accuracies of 86.65% and 90.48%, respectively. CNN leads to better classification, resulting in an overall accuracy of 91.71%. A sensitivity analysis shows that deeper networks result in higher accuracies when large training sets are used. The study concludes that training CNN in an end-to-end fashion can automatically learn spatial features from the data that are capable of discriminating complex urban land use classes.
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•We explored surface dynamics with PAZ co-polarimetric SAR data.•An IRF-based method for constantly coherent scatterers selection was demonstrated.•Co-polarimetric phase difference method was used ...for scattering characterization.
In this contribution, we investigate PAZ co-polarimetric SAR data applicability for surface movement mapping and scattering characterization. PAZ simultaneously collects SAR imagery in both VV and HH channels. Using a small stack of PAZ data, we apply the real-valued impulse response function correlation to identify constantly coherent scatterers (CCS), separately in VV and HH, in the course of time series InSAR (Interferometric SAR) processing. The proposed method has an advantage to selecting the CCS with minimal incoherent scatterer inclusion and exact radar location, which can eventually lead to the precise deformation time series estimations of all CCS, and a high-precision surface movement map. Moreover, we apply the co-polarimetric phase difference (CPD) method to classify the CCS in terms of scattering mechanisms which provides a new attribute to every individual CCS. We recognize the sibling pairs by both thresholding the spatial distance between any two CCS observed separately in VV and HH, and using common scattering characteristic as a new criterion. The deformation estimates of sibling pairs are used to reduce the biases in the deformation estimates of every ground target. The proposed methods are demonstrated in a test site, in the northern part of the Netherlands, using 10 co-polarimetric SAR data acquired between September 2019 and April 2020. The results show that 83.5% sibling pairs behave a linear deformation trend over time, and that the other pairs show a correlation between their deformation and temperature, and the sibling pairs with the surface, dihedral, volume scattering mechanisms account for 62%,12% and 26%, respectively. We conclude that by combining data from VV and HH polarization as siblings, PAZ co-polarimetric SAR data are highly suited to map surface changes and characterize surface features.
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► Slums have different definitions and appearance across different contexts. ► Input from domain experts have been used to form a generic slum ontology (GSO). ► GSO comprises of concepts and ...indicators which can be analyzed through remote sensing. ► Local adaptation of GSO and object-oriented analysis (OOA) parameterization is demonstrated. ► The GSO provides a comprehensive basis for image-based classification of slums.
Information about rapidly changing slum areas may support the development of appropriate interventions by concerned authorities. Often, however, traditional data collection methods lack information on the spatial distribution of slum-dwellers. Remote sensing based methods could be used for a rapid inventory of the location and physical composition of slums. (Semi-)automatic detection of slums in image data is challenging, owing to the high variability in appearance and definitions across different contexts. This paper develops an ontological framework to conceptualize slums using input from 50 domain-experts covering 16 different countries. This generic slum ontology (GSO) comprises concepts identified at three levels that refer to the morphology of the built environment: the environs level, the settlement level and the object level. It serves as a comprehensive basis for image-based classification of slums, in particular, using object-oriented image analysis (OOA) techniques. This is demonstrated by with an example of local adaptation of GSO and OOA parameterization for a study area in Kisumu, Kenya. At the object level, building and road characteristics are major components of the ontology. At the settlement level, texture measures can be potentially used to represent the contrast between planned and unplanned settlements. At the environs level, factors which extend beyond the site itself are important indicators, e.g. hazards due to floods plains and marshy conditions. The GSO provides a comprehensive framework that includes all potentially relevant indicators that can be used for image-based slum identification. These characteristics may be different for other study areas, but show the applicability of the developed framework.
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Water resources management is a complex task. It requires accurate prediction of inflow to reservoirs for the optimal management of surface resources, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. It is ...in particular complicated by droughts. Markov chain models have provided valuable information on drought or moisture conditions. A complementary method, however, is required that can both evaluate the accuracy of the Markov chain models for predicted drought conditions, and forecast the values for ensuing months. To that end, this study draws on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) as a data-driven model. The employed ANNs were trained and tested by means of a statistically-based input selection procedure to accurately predict reservoir inflow and consequently drought conditions. Thirty three years’ data of inflow volume on a monthly time resolution were selected to enable calculation of the standardized streamflow index (SSI) for the Markov chain model. Availability of hydro-climatic data from the Doroodzan reservoir in the Fars province, Iran, allowed us to develop a reservoir specific ANN model. Results demonstrated that both models accurately predicted drought conditions, by employing a randomization procedure that facilitated the selection of the required data for the ANN to forecast reservoir inflow close to the observed values over a validation period. The results confirmed that combining the two models improved short-term prediction reliability. This was in contrast to single model applications that resulted into substantial uncertainty. This research emphasized the importance of the correct selection of data or data mining, prior to entering a specific modeling routine.
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CEKLJ, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
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