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The new generation of available (i.e., PRISMA, ENMAP, DESIS) and future (i.e., ESA-CHIME, NASA-SBG) spaceborne hyperspectral missions provide unprecedented data for environmental and agricultural monitoring, such as crop trait assessment. This paper focuses on retrieving two crop traits, specifically Chlorophyll and Nitrogen content at the canopy level (CCC and CNC), starting from hyperspectral images acquired during the CHIME-RCS project, exploiting a self-supervised learning (SSL) technique. SSL is a machine learning paradigm that leverages unlabeled data to generate valuable representations for downstream tasks, bridging the gap between unsupervised and supervised learning. The proposed method comprises pre-training and fine-tuning procedures: in the first stage, a de-noising Convolutional Autoencoder is trained using pairs of noisy and clean CHIME-like images; the pre-trained Encoder network is utilized as-is or fine-tuned in the second stage. The paper demonstrates the applicability of this technique in hybrid approach methods that combine Radiative Transfer Modelling (RTM) and Machine Learning Regression Algorithm (MLRA) to set up a retrieval schema able to estimate crop traits from new generation space-born hyperspectral data. The results showcase excellent prediction accuracy for estimating CCC (R2 = 0.8318; RMSE = 0.2490) and CNC (R2 = 0.9186; RMSE = 0.7908) for maize crops from CHIME-like images without requiring further ground data calibration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automatic calculation of sediment maps from hydroacoustic data is of great importance for habitat and sediment mapping as well as monitoring tasks. For this reason, numerous papers have been published that are based on a variety of algorithms and different kinds of input data. However, the current literature lacks comparative studies that investigate the performance of different approaches in depth. Therefore, this study aims to provide recommendations for suitable approaches for the automatic classification of side-scan sonar data that can be applied by agencies and researchers. With random forests, support vector machines, and convolutional neural networks, both traditional machine-learning methods and novel deep learning techniques have been implemented to evaluate their performance regarding the classification of backscatter data from two study sites located in the Sylt Outer Reef in the German Bight. Simple statistical values, textural features, and Weyl coefficients were calculated for different patch sizes as well as levels of quantization and then utilized in the machine-learning algorithms. It is found that large image patches of 32 px size and the combined use of different feature groups lead to the best classification performances. Further, the neural network and support vector machines generated visually more appealing sediment maps than random forests, despite scoring lower overall accuracy. Based on these findings, we recommend classifying side-scan sonar data with image patches of 32 px size and 6-bit quantization either directly in neural networks or with the combined use of multiple feature groups in support vector machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global solar photovoltaic capacity has consistently doubled every 18 months over the last two decades, going from 0.3 GW in 2000 to 643 GW in 2019, and is forecast to reach 4240 GW by 2040. However, these numbers are uncertain, and virtually all reporting on deployments lacks a unified source of either information or validation. In this paper, we propose, optimize, and validate a deep learning framework to detect and map solar farms using a state-of-the-art semantic segmentation convolutional neural network applied to satellite imagery. As a final step in the pipeline, we propose a model to estimate the energy generation capacity of the detected solar energy facilities. Objectively, the deep learning model achieved highly competitive performance indicators, including a mean accuracy of 96.87%, and a Jaccard Index (intersection over union of classified pixels) score of 95.5%. Subjectively, it was found to detect spaces between panels producing a segmentation output at a sub-farm level that was better than human labeling. Finally, the detected areas and predicted generation capacities were validated against publicly available data to within an average error of 4.5% Deep learning applied specifically for the detection and mapping of solar farms is an active area of research, and this deep learning capacity evaluation pipeline is one of the first of its kind. We also share an original dataset of overhead solar farm satellite imagery comprising 23,000 images (256 × 256 pixels each), and the corresponding labels upon which the machine learning model was trained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, hyperspectral image (HSI) classification (HSIC) methods that use deep learning have proved to be effective. In particular, the utilization of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has proved to be highly effective. However, some key issues need to be addressed when classifying hyperspectral images (HSIs), such as small samples, which can influence the generalization ability of the CNNs and the HSIC results. To address this problem, we present a new network that integrates hybrid pyramid feature fusion and coordinate attention for enhancing small sample HSI classification results. The innovative nature of this paper lies in three main areas. Firstly, a baseline network is designed. This is a simple hybrid 3D-2D CNN. Using this baseline network, more robust spectral-spatial feature information can be obtained from the HSI. Secondly, a hybrid pyramid feature fusion mechanism is used, meaning that the feature maps of different levels and scales can be effectively fused to enhance the feature extracted by the model. Finally, coordinate attention mechanisms are utilized in the network, which can not only adaptively capture the information of the spectral dimension, but also include the direction-aware and position sensitive information. By doing this, the proposed CNN structure can extract more useful HSI features and effectively be generalized to test samples. The proposed method was shown to obtain better results than several existing methods by experimenting on three public HSI datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) is a remote sensing image analysis paradigm that defines and examines image-objects: groups of neighboring pixels that represent real-world geographic objects. Recent reviews have examined methodological considerations and highlighted how GEOBIA improves upon the 30+ year pixel-based approach, particularly for H-resolution imagery. However, the literature also exposes an opportunity to improve guidance on the application of GEOBIA for novice practitioners. In this paper, we describe the theoretical foundations of GEOBIA and provide a comprehensive overview of the methodological workflow, including: (i) software-specific approaches (open-source and commercial); (ii) best practices informed by research; and (iii) the current status of methodological research. Building on this foundation, we then review recent research on the convergence of GEOBIA with deep convolutional neural networks, which we suggest is a new form of GEOBIA. Specifically, we discuss general integrative approaches and offer recommendations for future research. Overall, this paper describes the past, present, and anticipated future of GEOBIA in a novice-accessible format, while providing innovation and depth to experienced practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inaccurate Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) navigation information will lead to unknown phase errors in SAR data. Uncompensated phase errors can blur the SAR images. Autofocus is a technique that can automatically estimate phase errors from data. However, existing autofocus algorithms either have poor focusing quality or a slow focusing speed. In this paper, an ensemble learning-based autofocus method is proposed. Convolutional Extreme Learning Machine (CELM) is constructed and utilized to estimate the phase error. However, the performance of a single CELM is poor. To overcome this, a novel, metric-based combination strategy is proposed, combining multiple CELMs to further improve the estimation accuracy. The proposed model is trained with the classical bagging-based ensemble learning method. The training and testing process is non-iterative and fast. Experimental results conducted on real SAR data show that the proposed method has a good trade-off between focusing quality and speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, deep learning has been successfully and widely used in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Considering the difficulty of acquiring HSIs, there are usually a small number of pixels used as the training instances. Therefore, it is hard to fully use the advantages of deep learning networks; for example, the very deep layers with a large number of parameters lead to overfitting. This paper proposed a dynamic wide and deep neural network (DWDNN) for HSI classification, which includes multiple efficient wide sliding window and subsampling (EWSWS) networks and can grow dynamically according to the complexity of the problems. The EWSWS network in the DWDNN was designed both in the wide and deep direction with transform kernels as hidden units. These multiple layers of kernels can extract features from the low to high level, and because they are extended in the wide direction, they can learn features more steadily and smoothly. The sliding windows with the stride and subsampling were designed to reduce the dimension of the features for each layer; therefore, the computational load was reduced. Finally, all the weights were only from the fully connected layer, and the iterative least squares method was used to compute them easily. The proposed DWDNN was tested with several HSI data including the Botswana, Pavia University, and Salinas remote sensing datasets with different numbers of instances (from small to big). The experimental results showed that the proposed method had the highest test accuracies compared to both the typical machine learning methods such as support vector machine (SVM), multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis function (RBF), and the recently proposed deep learning methods including the 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) and the 3D CNN designed for HSI classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wetlands are important ecosystems that are linked to climate change mitigation. As 25% of global wetlands are located in Canada, accurate and up-to-date wetland classification is of high importance, nationally and internationally. The advent of deep learning techniques has revolutionized the current use of machine learning algorithms to classify complex environments, specifically in remote sensing. In this paper, we explore the potential and possible limitations to be overcome regarding the use of ensemble deep learning techniques for complex wetland classification and discusses the potential and limitation of various solo convolutional neural networks (CNNs), including DenseNet, GoogLeNet, ShuffleNet, MobileNet, Xception, Inception-ResNet, ResNet18, and ResNet101 in three different study areas located in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (i.e., Avalon, Gros Morne, and Grand Falls). Moreover, to improve the classification accuracies of wetland classes of bog, fen, marsh, swamp, and shallow water, the results of the three best CNNs in each study area is fused using three supervised classifiers of random forest (RF), bagged tree (BTree), Bayesian optimized tree (BOT), and one unsupervised majority voting classifier. The results suggest that the ensemble models, in particular BTree, have a valuable role to play in the classification of wetland classes of bog, fen, marsh, swamp, and shallow water. The ensemble CNNs show an improvement of 9.63–19.04% in terms of mean producer's accuracy compared to the solo CNNs, to recognize wetland classes in three different study areas. This research indicates a promising potential for integrating ensemble-based learning and deep learning for operational large area land cover, particularly complex wetland type classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supraglacial meltwater accumulation on ice sheets can be a main driver for accelerated ice discharge, mass loss, and global sea-level-rise. With further increasing surface air temperatures, meltwater-induced hydrofracturing, basal sliding, or surface thinning will cumulate and most likely trigger unprecedented ice mass loss on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. While the Greenland surface hydrological network as well as its impacts on ice dynamics and mass balance has been studied in much detail, Antarctic supraglacial lakes remain understudied with a circum-Antarctic record of their spatio-temporal development entirely lacking. This study provides the first automated supraglacial lake extent mapping method using Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery over Antarctica and complements the developed optical Sentinel-2 supraglacial lake detection algorithm presented in our companion paper. In detail, we propose the use of a modified U-Net for semantic segmentation of supraglacial lakes in single-polarized Sentinel-1 imagery. The convolutional neural network (CNN) is implemented with residual connections for optimized performance as well as an Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module for multiscale feature extraction. The algorithm is trained on 21,200 Sentinel-1 image patches and evaluated in ten spatially or temporally independent test acquisitions. In addition, George VI Ice Shelf is analyzed for intra-annual lake dynamics throughout austral summer 2019/2020 and a decision-level fused Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 maximum lake extent mapping product is presented for January 2020 revealing a more complete supraglacial lake coverage (~770 km2) than the individual single-sensor products. Classification results confirm the reliability of the proposed workflow with an average Kappa coefficient of 0.925 and a F 1 -score of 93.0% for the supraglacial water class across all test regions. Furthermore, the algorithm is applied in an additional test region covering supraglacial lakes on the Greenland ice sheet which further highlights the potential for spatio-temporal transferability. Future work involves the integration of more training data as well as intra-annual analyses of supraglacial lake occurrence across the whole continent and with focus on supraglacial lake development throughout a summer melt season and into Antarctic winter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, deep learning methods based on three-dimensional (3-D) convolution have been widely used in the hyperspectral image (HSI) classification tasks and shown good classification performance. However, affected by the irregular distribution of various classes in HSI datasets, most previous 3-D convolutional neural network (CNN)-based models require more training samples to obtain better classification accuracies. In addition, as the network deepens, which leads to the spatial resolution of feature maps gradually decreasing, much useful information may be lost during the training process. Therefore, how to ensure efficient network training is key to the HSI classification tasks. To address the issue mentioned above, in this paper, we proposed a 3-DCNN-based residual group channel and space attention network (RGCSA) for HSI classification. Firstly, the proposed bottom-up top-down attention structure with the residual connection can improve network training efficiency by optimizing channel-wise and spatial-wise features throughout the whole training process. Secondly, the proposed residual group channel-wise attention module can reduce the possibility of losing useful information, and the novel spatial-wise attention module can extract context information to strengthen the spatial features. Furthermore, our proposed RGCSA network only needs few training samples to achieve higher classification accuracies than previous 3-D-CNN-based networks. The experimental results on three commonly used HSI datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed network based on the attention mechanism and the effectiveness of the proposed channel-wise and spatial-wise attention modules for HSI classification. The code and configurations are released at Github.com. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]