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This paper aims to achieve bedrock geologic mapping in the overburden area using big data, distributed computing, and deep learning techniques. First, the satellite Bouguer gravity anomaly with a resolution of 2'x2' in the range of E66°E96°, N40°-N55° and 1:5000000 Asia-European geological map are used to design a dataset for bedrock prediction. Then, starting from the gravity anomaly formula in the spherical coordinate system, we deduce the non-linear functional between rock density ρ and rock mineral composition m, content p, buried depth h, diagenesis time t and other variables. We analyze the feasibility of using deep neural network to approximate the above nonlinear generalization. The problem of solving deep neural network parameters is transformed into a non-convex optimization problem. We give an iterative, gradient descentbased solution algorithm for the non-convex optimization problem. Utilizing neural architecture search (NAS) and human-designed approach, we propose a geological-geophysical mapping network (GGMNet). The dataset for the network consists of both gravity anomaly and a priori geological information. The network has fast convergence speed and stable iteration during the training process. It also has better performance than a single neural network search or human-designed architectures, with the mean pixel accuracy (MAP) = 63.1% and the frequency weighted intersection over union (FWIoU) = 42.88. Finally, the GGMNet is used to predict the rock distribution of the Junggar Basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sugar apple (Annona squamosa) is valued for its taste, nutritional richness, and versatility, making it suitable for fresh consumption and medicinal use with significant commercial potential. Widely found in the tropical Americas and Asia's tropical or subtropical regions, it faces challenges in post-harvest ripeness assessment, predominantly reliant on manual inspection, leading to inefficiency and high labor costs. This paper explores the application of computer vision techniques in detecting ripeness levels of harvested sugar apples and proposes an improved deep learning model (ECD-DeepLabv3+) specifically designed for ripeness detection tasks. Firstly, the proposed model adopts a lightweight backbone (MobileNetV2), reducing complexity while maintaining performance through MobileNetV2′s unique design. Secondly, it incorporates the efficient channel attention (ECA) module to enhance focus on the input image and capture crucial feature information. Additionally, a Dense ASPP module is introduced, which enhances the model's perceptual ability and expands the receptive field by stacking feature maps processed with different dilation rates. Lastly, the proposed model emphasizes the spatial information of sugar apples at different ripeness levels by the coordinate attention (CA) module. Model performance is validated using a self-made dataset of harvested optical images categorized into three ripeness levels. The proposed model (ECD-DeepLabv3+) achieves values of 89.95% for MIoU, 94.58% for MPA, 96.60% for PA, and 94.61% for MF1, respectively. Compared to the original DeepLabv3+, it greatly reduces the number of model parameters (Params) and floating-point operations (Flops) by 89.20% and 69.09%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed method could be directly applied to optical images obtained from the surface of the sugar apple, which provides a potential solution for the detection of post-harvest fruit ripeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worldwide websites publish enormous amounts of text, audio, and video content every day. This valuable information allows for the assessment of regional trends and general public opinion. Based on consumers' online behavioural habits, businesses are showing them their chosen ads. It is difficult to carefully analyse these raw data to find valuable trends, especially for a language with limited resources like Urdu. There have not been many studies or efforts to create language resources for the Urdu language and analyse people's sentiment, even though there are more than 169 million Urdu speakers in the world and a sizable amount of Urdu data is generated on various social media platforms every day. However, there has been relatively little research on sentiment analysis in Urdu. Researchers have primarily performed studies in English and Chinese. In response to this gap, we suggest an emotion analyser for Urdu, the primary language of Asia, in this research study. In this paper, we propose to assess sentiment in Urdu review texts by integrating a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model with a convolutional neural network (CNN). We contrast the CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, and CNN-LSTM models with the CNN-BiLSTM model. With an accuracy rate of 0.99 %, the CNN-BiLSTM model performed better than the other models in an initial investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, several mutations have occurred in the genetic sequence of the virus, resulting in emerging different variants of concern. These variants vary in transmissibility, severity of infections, and mortality rate. Designing models that are capable of predicting the future behavior of these variants in the societies can help decision makers and the healthcare system to design efficient health policies, and to be prepared with the sufficient medical devices and an adequate number of personnel to fight against this virus and the similar ones. Among variants of COVID-19, Alpha and Delta variants differ noticeably in the virus structures. In this paper, we study these variants in the geographical regions with different size, population densities, and social life styles. These regions include the country of Iran, the continent of Asia, and the whole world. We propose four deep learning models based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and examine their predictive power in forecasting the number of infections and deaths for the next three, next five, and next seven days in each variant. These models include Encoder Decoder LSTM (ED-LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), Convolutional LSTM (Conv-LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Performance of these models in predictions are evaluated using the root mean square error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percentage error. Then, the Friedman test is applied to find the leading model for predictions in all conditions. The results show that ED-LSTM is generally the leading model for predicting the number of infections and deaths for both variants of Alpha and Delta, with the ability to forecast long time intervals ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem definition: Restaurant review platforms, such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, routinely receive large numbers of photos in their review submissions. These photos provide significant value for users who seek to compare restaurants. In this context, the choice of cover images (i.e., representative photos of the restaurants) can greatly influence the level of user engagement on the platform. Unfortunately, selecting these images can be time consuming and often requires human intervention. At the same time, it is challenging to develop a systematic approach to assess the effectiveness of the selected images. Methodology/results: In this paper, we collaborate with a large review platform in Asia to investigate this problem. We discuss two image selection approaches, namely crowd-based and artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems. The AI-based system we use learns complex latent image features, which are further enhanced by transfer learning to overcome the scarcity of labeled data. We collaborate with the platform to deploy our AI-based system through a randomized field experiment to carefully compare both systems. We find that the AI-based system outperforms the crowd-based counterpart and boosts user engagement by 12.43%–16.05% on average. We then conduct empirical analyses on observational data to identify the underlying mechanisms that drive the superior performance of the AI-based system. Managerial implications: Finally, we infer from our findings that the AI-based system outperforms the crowd-based system for restaurants with (i) a longer tenure on the platform, (ii) a limited number of user-generated photos, (iii) a lower star rating, and (iv) lower user engagement during the crowd-based system. Funding: The authors acknowledge financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [Grant 430-2020-00106]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2021.0531. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advancements in AI, driven by big data technologies, have reshaped various industries, with a strong focus on data-driven approaches. This has resulted in remarkable progress in fields like computer vision, e-commerce, cybersecurity, and healthcare, primarily fueled by the integration of machine learning and deep learning models. Notably, the intersection of oncology and computer science has given rise to Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems, offering vital tools to aid medical professionals in tumor detection, classification, recurrence tracking, and prognosis prediction. Breast cancer, a significant global health concern, is particularly prevalent in Asia due to diverse factors like lifestyle, genetics, environmental exposures, and healthcare accessibility. Early detection through mammography screening is critical, but the accuracy of mammograms can vary due to factors like breast composition and tumor characteristics, leading to potential misdiagnoses. To address this, an innovative CAD system leveraging deep learning and computer vision techniques was introduced. This system enhances breast cancer diagnosis by independently identifying and categorizing breast lesions, segmenting mass lesions, and classifying them based on pathology. Thorough validation using the Curated Breast Imaging Subset of Digital Database for Screening Mammography (CBIS-DDSM) demonstrated the CAD system's exceptional performance, with a 99% success rate in detecting and classifying breast masses. While the accuracy of detection is 98.5%, when segmenting breast masses into separate groups for examination, the method's performance was approximately 95.39%. Upon completing all the analysis, the system's classification phase yielded an overall accuracy of 99.16% for classification. The potential for this integrated framework to outperform current deep learning techniques is proposed, despite potential challenges related to the high number of trainable parameters. Ultimately, this recommended framework offers valuable support to researchers and physicians in breast cancer diagnosis by harnessing cutting-edge AI and image processing technologies, extending recent advances in deep learning to the medical domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper enters the ongoing volatility forecasting debate by examining the ability of a wide range of Machine Learning methods (ML), and specifically Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models. The ANN models are compared against traditional econometric models for ten Asian markets using daily data for the time period from 12 September 1994 to 05 March 2018. The empirical results indicate that ML algorithms, across the range of countries, can better approximate dependencies compared to traditional benchmark models. Notably, the predictive performance of such deep learning models is superior perhaps due to its ability in capturing long-range dependencies. For example, the Neuro Fuzzy models of ANFIS and CANFIS, which outperform the EGARCH model, are more flexible in modelling both asymmetry and long memory properties. This offers new insights for Asian markets. In addition to standard statistics forecast metrics, we also consider risk management measures including the value-at-risk (VaR) average failure rate, the Kupiec LR test, the Christoffersen independence test, the expected shortfall (ES) and the dynamic quantile test. The study concludes that ML algorithms provide improving volatility forecasts in the stock markets of Asia and suggest that this may be a fruitful approach for risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the most common histological types of esophageal cancers. It can seriously affect public health, particularly in Eastern Asia. Early diagnosis and effective therapy of ESCC can significantly help improve patient prognoses. The visualization of intrapapillary capillary loops (IPCLs) under magnification endoscopy (ME) can greatly support the identification of ESCC occurrences by endoscopists. This paper proposes an artificial-intelligence-assisted endoscopic diagnosis approach using deep learning for localizing and identifying IPCLs to diagnose early-stage ESCC. An improved Faster region-based convolutional network (R-CNN) with a polarized self-attention (PSA)-HRNetV2p backbone was employed to automatically detect IPCLs in ME images. In our study, 2887 ME with blue laser imaging (ME-BLI) images of 246 patients and 493 ME with narrow-band imaging (ME-NBI) images of 81 patients were collected from multiple hospitals and used to train and test our detection model. The ME-NBI images were used as the external testing set to verify the generalizability of the model. The experimental evaluation revealed that the proposed method achieved a recall of 79.25%, precision of 75.54%, F1-score of 0.764 and mean average precision (mAP) of 74.95%. Our method outperformed other existing approaches in our evaluation. It can effectively improve the accuracy of ESCC detection and provide a useful adjunct to the assessment of early-stage ESCC for endoscopists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Accurate diagnosis and early treatment are essential in the fight against lymphatic cancer. The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of medical imaging shows great potential, but the diagnostic accuracy of lymphoma is unclear. This study was done to systematically review and meta-analyse researches concerning the diagnostic performance of AI in detecting lymphoma using medical imaging for the first time. Methods: Searches were conducted in Medline, Embase, IEEE and Cochrane up to December 2023. Data extraction and assessment of the included study quality were independently conducted by two investigators. Studies that reported the diagnostic performance of an AI model/s for the early detection of lymphoma using medical imaging were included in the systemic review. We extracted the binary diagnostic accuracy data to obtain the outcomes of interest: sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP), and Area Under the Curve (AUC). The study was registered with the PROSPERO, CRD42022383386. Results: Thirty studies were included in the systematic review, sixteen of which were meta-analyzed with a pooled sensitivity of 87% (95%CI 83–91%), specificity of 94% (92–96%), and AUC of 97% (95–98%). Satisfactory diagnostic performance was observed in subgroup analyses based on algorithms types (machine learning versus deep learning, and whether transfer learning was applied), sample size (≤ 200 or > 200), clinicians versus AI models and geographical distribution of institutions (Asia versus non-Asia). Conclusions: Even if possible overestimation and further studies with a better standards for application of AI algorithms in lymphoma detection are needed, we suggest the AI may be useful in lymphoma diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the lakes located in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are important carriers of water resources in Asia, dynamic changes to these lakes intuitively reflect the climate and water resource variations of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. To address the insufficient performance of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in learning the spatial relationship between long-distance continuous pixels, this study proposes a water recognition model for lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau based on U-Net and ViTenc-UNet. This method uses Vision Transformer (ViT) to replace the continuous Convolutional Neural Network layer in the encoder of the U-Net model, which can more accurately identify and extract the continuous spatial relationship of lake water bodies. A Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) mechanism was added to the decoder of the model enabling the spatial information and spectral information characteristics of the water bodies to be more completely preserved. The experimental results show that the ViTenc-UNet model can complete the task of lake water recognition on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau more efficiently, and the Overall Accuracy, Intersection over Union, Recall, Precision, and F1 score of the classification results for lake water bodies reached 99.04%, 98.68%, 99.08%, 98.59%, and 98.75%, which were, respectively, 4.16%, 6.20% 5.34%, 4.80%, and 5.34% higher than the original U-Net model. Compared to FCN, the DeepLabv3+, TransUNet, and Swin-Unet models also have different degrees of advantages. This model innovatively introduces ViT and CBAM into the water extraction task of lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, showing excellent water classification performance of these lake bodies. This method has certain classification advantages and will provide an important scientific reference for the accurate real-time monitoring of important water resources on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anime-style comics are popular world-wide and an important industry in Asia. However, the output quantity and quality control of art workers have become the biggest obstacle to industrialization, and it is time consuming to produce new manga without the help of an intelligence assisted tool. As deep learning techniques have achieved great successes in different areas, it is worth exploring them to develop algorithms and systems for computational manga. Extracting line drawings from finished illustrations is one of the main tasks in drawing a manuscript and also a crucial task in the common painting process. However, traditional filters such as Sobel, Laplace, and Canny cannot output good results and require manual adjustments of the parameters. In order to address these problems, in this paper, we propose progressive full data convolutional neural networks for extracting lines from anime-style illustrations. Experimental results show that our progressive full data convolutional neural networks not only can learn as much as processing methods for the detailed regions, but also can accomplish the target extraction work with only a small training dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heart diseases are currently a major cause of death in the world. This problem is severe in developing countries in Africa and Asia. A heart disease predicted at earlier stages not only helps the patients prevent it, but I can also help the medical practitioners learn the major causes of a heart attack and avoid it before its actual occurrence in patient. In this paper, we propose a method named CardioHelp which predicts the probability of the presence of cardiovascular disease in a patient by incorporating a deep learning algorithm called convolutional neural networks (CNN). The proposed method is concerned with temporal data modeling by utilizing CNN for HF prediction at its earliest stage. We prepared the heart disease dataset and compared the results with state-of-the-art methods and achieved good results. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of performance evaluation metrics. The achieved accuracy of the proposed method is 97%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rice is a plant with rounded hollow articulated culms, flat, well-attached leaf blades, and terminal spikes. Its cultivation and consumption shape the culture, diet, and economy of different groups, especially in Asia. However, farmers suffer great financial losses each year due to rice disease. Therefore, the identification and classification of rice diseases are very important. Prompt, timely, and accurate disease diagnosis prevents product loss and improves crop quality. This study focuses on the classification of whether rice paddy leaf is normal or has a disease (one of the following: bacterial leaf blight (BLB), bacterial leaf streaks (BLS), bacterial panicle blight (BPB): heart, downy mildew, hispa, and rice tungro disease (RTD)) using deep learning-based algorithms such as EfficientNet-b0, MobileNet-v2, and Places365-GoogLeNet. The best model for this simulation was found to be EfficientNet-b0 with an average accuracy of 97.74%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paddy is an essential nutrient worldwide. Rice gives 21% of worldwide human per capita energy and 15% of per capita protein. Asia represented 60% of the worldwide populace, about 92% of the world's rice creation, and 90% of worldwide rice utilization. With the increase in population, the demand for rice is increased. So, the productivity of farming is needed to be enhanced by introducing new technology. Deep learning and IoT are hot topics for research in various fields. This paper suggested a setup comprising deep learning and IoT for monitoring of paddy field remotely. The vgg16 pre-trained network is considered for the identification of paddy leaf diseases and nitrogen status estimation. Here, two strategies are carried out to identify images: transfer learning and deep feature extraction. The deep feature extraction approach is combined with a support vector machine (SVM) to classify images. The transfer learning approach of vgg16 for identifying four types of leaf diseases and prediction of nitrogen status results in 79.86% and 84.88% accuracy. Again, the deep features of Vgg16 and SVM results for identifying four types of leaf diseases and prediction of nitrogen status have achieved an accuracy of 97.31% and 99.02%, respectively. Besides, a framework is suggested for monitoring of paddy field remotely based on IoT and deep learning. The suggested prototype's superiority is that it controls temperature and humidity like the state-of-the-art and can monitor the additional two aspects, such as detecting nitrogen status and diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a data-driven approach, the performance of deep learning models depends largely on the quantity and quality of the training data sets, which greatly limits the application of deep learning to tasks with small data sets. Unfortunately, sometimes we need to use limited small data sets to complete our tasks, such as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data denoising. However, using a small data set to train the network may cause overfitting, resulting in poor network generalization. To solve this problem, we propose an approach based on the combination of a generative adversarial network and a deep convolutional neural network. First, we used a small noise data set to train a generative adversarial network to generate synthetic noise samples, and then used these synthetic noise samples to augment the noise data set. Next, we used the augmented noise data set and the signal data set obtained through forward modelling to construct a synthetic training set. Finally, a denoising network based on a convolutional neural network was trained on the constructed synthetic training set. Experimental results show that the augmented data set can effectively improve the denoising performance and generalization ability of the network, and the denoising network trained on the augmented data set can more effectively reduce various kinds of noise in the DAS data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate downscaling is a way to provide finer resolution data at local scales, which has been widely used in meteorological research. The two main approaches for climate downscaling are dynamical and statistical. The traditional dynamical downscaling methods are quite time- and resource-consuming based on general circulation models (GCMs). Recently, more and more researchers construct a statistical deep learning model for climate downscaling motivated by the single-image superresolution (SISR) process in computer vision (CV). This is an approach that uses historical climate observations to learn a low-resolution to high-resolution mapping and produces great enhancements in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, it has provided an appreciable new insight and successful downscaling solution to multiple climate phenomena. However, most existing models only make a simple analogy between climate downscaling and SISR and ignore the underlying dynamical mechanisms, which leads to the overaveraged downscaling results lacking crucial physical details. In this paper, we incorporate the a priori meteorological knowledge into a deep learning formalization for climate downscaling. More specifically, we consider the multiscale spatial correlations and the chaos in multiple climate events. Depending on two characteristics, we build up a two-stage deep learning model containing a stepwise reconstruction process and ensemble inference, which is named climate downscaling network (CDN). It can extract more local/remote spatial dependencies and provide more comprehensive captures of extreme conditions. We evaluate our model based on two datasets: climate science dataset (CSD) and benchmark image dataset (BID). The results demonstrate that our model shows the effectiveness and superiority in downscaling daily precipitation data from 2.5 degrees to 0.5 degrees over Asia and Europe. In addition, our model exhibits better performance than the other traditional approaches and state-of-the-art deep learning models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quasi-periodic signals in the earth system could be the predictability source for sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) climate prediction because of the connections among the lead-lag time of those signals. The Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a typical quasi-periodic signal, which is the dominant S2S variability in the tropics. Besides, significantly periodic features in terms of both intensity and location are identified in 10–40 days for the concurrent variation of the subtropical and polar jet streams over Asia in this study. So far, those signals contribute less and are not fully applied to the S2S prediction. The deep learning (DL) approach, especially the long-short term memory (LSTM) networks, has the ability to take advantage of the information at the previous time to improve the prediction after then. This study presents the application of the DL in the postprocessing of S2S prediction using quasi-periodic signals predicted by the operational model to improve the prediction of minimum 2-m air temperature over Asia. With the help of deep learning, it finds the best weights for the ensemble predictions, and the quasi-periodic signals in the atmosphere can further benefit the S2S operational prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breast cancer develops when cells in the breast expand and divide uncontrollably, resulting in a lump of tissue known as a tumor. This lump of tissue is called a tumor. After skin cancer, breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women. It is more common in women over the age of 50. Men may also acquire breast cancer, albeit it is uncommon. Each year, approximately 2,600 men in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer, accounting for less than 1% of all cases. Transgender women are more likely than cisgender men to acquire breast cancer. Additionally, transgender males are less likely than cisgender women to acquire breast cancer. Breast cancer is more common in women over the age of 50, although it can affect anyone at any age. Early detection of a breast tumor may significantly lower the risk of developing breast cancer. A public dataset of breast tumor features was used instead to build models for identifying breast tumors through machine learning and deep learning. Prediction models were built using logistic regression (LR), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), voting classifier (VC), support vector machine (SVM), and a proprietary convolutional neural network (CNN). These models were used to find critical prognostic indicators linked to breast cancer. The proposed network performs far better, with an average accuracy of 99%. This study has six types of models: LR, RF, SVM, VC, DT, and a custom CNN model. They all had 96% to 99% accuracy in this study. CNN, LR, RF, SVM, VC, and DT achieved 99%, 96%, 98%, 97%, 97%, and 96% F1 score, respectively. There were many machine learning algorithms used in this study that were very accurate, which means that these techniques could be used as alternative prognostic tools in breast tumor detection studies in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between outward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and the performance of Chinese enterprises. Using firm‐level panel data over the period 2008–2014, we introduce a taxonomy of outward FDI that accounts for the decision to invest abroad and the location of foreign affiliates. Through different specifications, we show systematic differences in performance between FDI starters and non‐starters two years before and two years after the first investment by the starters. This fact points to the existence of strong ex‐ante and ex‐post effects of Chinese outward FDI. On one hand, we provide evidence – so far not present in the literature – that the best performing Chinese firms self‐select into outward FDI. On the other hand, controlling for endogeneity through propensity score matching (PSM) techniques, we detect significant learning effects from outward FDI to firm‐level performance. Interestingly, these effects are heterogeneous with respect to destination, with deeper learning for Chinese enterprises investing in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intensity variation of the South Asian high (SAH) plays an important role in the formation and extinction of many kinds of mesoscale systems, including tropical cyclones, southwest vortices in the Asian summer monsoon (ASM) region, and the precipitation in the whole Asia Europe region, and the SAH has a vortex symmetrical structure; its dynamic field also has the symmetry form. Not enough previous studies focus on the variation of SAH daily intensity. The purpose of this study is to establish a day-to-day prediction model of the SAH intensity, which can accurately predict not only the interannual variation but also the day-to-day variation of the SAH. Focusing on the summer period when the SAH is the strongest, this paper selects the geopotential height data between 1948 and 2020 from NCEP to construct the SAH intensity datasets. Compared with the classical deep learning methods of various kinds of efficient time series prediction model, we ultimately combine the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (CEEMDAN) method, which has the ability to deal with the nonlinear and unstable single system, with the Permutation Entropy (PE) method, which can extract the SAH intensity feature of IMF decomposed by CEEMDAN, and the Convolution-based Gated Recurrent Neural Network (ConvGRU) model is used to train, test, and predict the intensity of the SAH. The prediction results show that the combination of CEEMDAN and ConvGRU can have a higher accuracy and more stable prediction ability than the traditional deep learning model. After removing the redundant features in the time series, the prediction accuracy of the SAH intensity is higher than that of the classical model, which proves that the method has good applicability for the prediction of nonlinear systems in the atmosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of free and open data from Earth observation programmes such as Copernicus, and from collaborative projects such as Open Street Map (OSM), enables low cost artificial intelligence (AI) based monitoring applications. This creates opportunities, particularly in developing countries with scarce economic resources, for large–scale monitoring in remote regions. A significant portion of Earth's surface comprises desert dune fields, where shifting sand affects infrastructure and hinders movement. A robust, cost–effective and scalable methodology is proposed for road detection and monitoring in regions covered by desert sand. The technique uses Copernicus Sentinel–1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite data as an input to a deep learning model based on the U–Net architecture for image segmentation. OSM data is used for model training. The method comprises two steps: The first involves processing time series of Sentinel–1 SAR interferometric wide swath (IW) acquisitions in the same geometry to produce multitemporal backscatter and coherence averages. These are divided into patches and matched with masks of OSM roads to form the training data, the quantity of which is increased through data augmentation. The second step includes the U–Net deep learning workflow. The methodology has been applied to three different dune fields in Africa and Asia. A performance evaluation through the calculation of the Jaccard similarity coefficient was carried out for each area, and ranges from 84% to 89% for the best available input. The rank distance, calculated from the completeness and correctness percentages, was also calculated and ranged from 75% to 80%. Over all areas there are more missed detections than false positives. In some cases, this was due to mixed infrastructure in the same resolution cell of the input SAR data. Drift sand and dune migration covering infrastructure is a concern in many desert regions, and broken segments in the resulting road detections are sometimes due to sand burial. The results also show that, in most cases, the Sentinel–1 vertical transmit–vertical receive (VV) backscatter averages alone constitute the best input to the U–Net model. The detection and monitoring of roads in desert areas are key concerns, particularly given a growing population increasingly on the move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]