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The accurate estimation of forest aboveground biomass is of great significance for forest management and carbon balance monitoring. Remote sensing instruments have been widely applied in forest parameters inversion with wide coverage and high spatiotemporal resolution. In this paper, the capability of different remote-sensed imagery was investigated, including multispectral images (GaoFen-6, Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8) and various SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data (GaoFen-3, Sentinel-1, ALOS-2), in aboveground forest biomass estimation. In particular, based on the forest inventory data of Hangzhou in China, the Random Forest (RF), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Convolutional Neural Networks Long Short-Term Memory Networks (CNN-LSTM) algorithms were deployed to construct the forest biomass estimation models, respectively. The estimate accuracies were evaluated under the different configurations of images and methods. The results show that for the SAR data, ALOS-2 has a higher biomass estimation accuracy than the GaoFen-3 and Sentinel-1. Moreover, the GaoFen-6 data is slightly worse than Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 optical data in biomass estimation. In contrast with the single source, integrating multisource data can effectively enhance accuracy, with improvements ranging from 5% to 10%. The CNN-LSTM generally performs better than CNN and RF, regardless of the data used. The combination of CNN-LSTM and multisource data provided the best results in this case and can achieve the maximum R2 value of up to 0.74. It was found that the majority of the biomass values in the study area in 2018 ranged from 60 to 90 Mg/ha, with an average value of 64.20 Mg/ha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road extraction is crucial in urban planning, rescue operations, and military applications. Compared to traditional methods, using deep learning for road extraction from remote sensing images has demonstrated unique advantages. However, previous convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based road extraction methods have had limited receptivity and failed to effectively capture long-distance road features. On the other hand, transformer-based methods have good global information-capturing capabilities, but face challenges in extracting road edge information. Additionally, existing excellent road extraction methods lack validation for the Chinese region. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel road extraction model called the global–local information fusion network (GLNet). In this model, the global information extraction (GIE) module effectively integrates global contextual relationships, the local information extraction (LIE) module accurately captures road edge information, and the information fusion (IF) module combines the output features from both global and local branches to generate the final extraction results. Further, a series of experiments on two different Chinese road datasets with geographic robustness demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning models for road extraction tasks in China. On the CHN6-CUG dataset, the overall accuracy (OA) and intersection over union (IoU) reach 97.49% and 63.27%, respectively, while on the RDCME dataset, OA and IoU reach 98.73% and 84.97%, respectively. These research results hold significant implications for road traffic, humanitarian rescue, and environmental monitoring, particularly in the context of the Chinese region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of marine environmental parameters plays a significant role in various aspects, including sea surface target detection, the monitoring of the marine ecological environment, marine meteorology and disaster forecasting, and the monitoring of internal waves in the ocean. In particular, for sea surface target detection, the accurate and high-resolution input of marine environmental parameters is crucial for multi-scale sea surface modeling and the prediction of sea clutter characteristics. In this paper, based on the low-resolution wind speed, significant wave height, and wave period data provided by ECMWF for the surrounding seas of China (specified latitude and longitude range), a deep learning model based on a residual structure is proposed. By introducing an attention module, the model effectively addresses the poor modeling performance of traditional methods like nearest neighbor interpolation and linear interpolation at the edge positions in the image. Experimental results demonstrate that with the proposed approach, when the spatial resolution of wind speed increases from 0.5° to 0.25°, the results achieve a mean square error (MSE) of 0.713, a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 49.598, and a structural similarity index measure (SSIM) of 0.981. When the spatial resolution of the significant wave height increases from 1° to 0.5°, the results achieve a MSE of 1.319, a PSNR of 46.928, and an SSIM of 0.957. When the spatial resolution of the wave period increases from 1° to 0.5°, the results achieve a MSE of 2.299, a PSNR of 44.515, and an SSIM of 0.940. The proposed method can generate high-resolution marine environmental parameter data for the surrounding seas of China at any given moment, providing data support for subsequent sea surface modeling and for the prediction of sea clutter characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a method for joint sea surface rainfall intensity (RI), wind speed, and wave height retrieval based on spaceborne global navigation satellite system reflectometry (GNSS-R) data is proposed, which especially considers the effects between these two parameters. A method of rainfall detection (RD) according to different wind speed ranges is also proposed by mitigating the impact of swell and wind speed. The results, with data collected over the oceans near Southeast Asia, show that the RD method has a detection accuracy of up to 81.74%. The RI retrieval accuracy can reach about 2 mm/h by simultaneously correcting the effects of wind speed and swell. The accuracy of wind speed retrieval is improved by about 5% after removing rainfall interference through RD in advance. After considering the influence of wind speed and eliminating rainfall interference, the retrieval accuracy of significant wave height (SWH) is improved by about 18%. Finally, the deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model is built to estimate the SWH of the swell. The results show that the retrieval accuracy of the swell height is better than 0.20 m after excluding rainfall interference. The proposed joint retrieval method provides an important reference for the future acquisition of multiple high-precision marine geophysical parameters by spaceborne GNSS-R technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to uncertainty in remotely sensed land cover products, there is continuing research on accuracy assessment and analysis. Given reference sample data, accuracy indicators are commonly estimated based on error matrices, from which areal extents of different cover types are also estimated. There are merits to explore the ways utilities of land cover products may be further enhanced beyond map face values and conventional area estimation. This paper presents an integrative method (CCAErrMat) for uncertainty characterization and utility enhancement. This works through reference-map cover type co-occurrence analyses based on error matrices localized in canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) ordination space rather than in geographic space to overcome the sparsity of reference sample data. The aforementioned co-occurrence analyses facilitate quantification of accuracy indicators, identification of correctly classified and perfectly misclassified pixels, and prediction of reference class probabilities, all at individual pixels. Moreover, these predicted reference class probabilities are used as auxiliary variables to formulate model-assisted area estimation, further enhancing map utilities. Extensions to CCAErrMat are also investigated as a way to bypass the pre-computing of map class occurrence pattern indices as candidate explanatory variables for CCAErrMat, leading to two variant methods: CCACCAErrMat and CNNCCAErrMat. A case study based in Wuhan municipality, central China was undertaken to compare the proposed method against alternative methods, including CCA-separate and CNN-separate. The advantages of CCAErrMat and CCACCAErrMat were confirmed. The proposed method is recommendable for characterizing uncertainty and enhancing utilities in land cover maps by analyzing locally constrained error matrices. The method is also cost-effective in terms of reference sample data, as requirements for them are similar to those for conventional accuracy assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timely and accurate crop yield information can ensure regional food security. In the field of predicting crop yields, deep learning techniques such as long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) are frequently employed. Many studies have shown that the predictions of models combining the two are better than those of single models. Crop growth can be reflected by the vegetation index calculated using data from remote sensing. However, the use of pure remote sensing data alone ignores the spatial heterogeneity of different regions. In this paper, we tested a total of three models, CNN-LSTM, CNN and convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM), for predicting the annual rice yield at the county level in Hubei Province, China. The model was trained by ERA5 temperature (AT) data, MODIS remote sensing data including the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) and Soil-Adapted Vegetation Index (SAVI), and a dummy variable representing spatial heterogeneity; rice yield data from 2000–2019 were employed as labels. Data download and processing were based on Google Earth Engine (GEE). The downloaded remote sensing images were processed into normalized histograms for the training and prediction of deep learning models. According to the experimental findings, the model that included a dummy variable to represent spatial heterogeneity had a stronger predictive ability than the model trained using just remote sensing data. The prediction performance of the CNN-LSTM model outperformed the CNN or ConvLSTM model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landslide disasters cause serious property losses and casualties every year. Landslide displacement prediction is fundamental for mitigating landslide disasters. Several approaches have been used to predict landslide displacement, yet a more accurate and reliable displacement prediction still has a poor understanding of landslide early warning systems for landslide mitigation, due to limited data and mutational displacements. To boost the robustness and accuracy of landslide displacement prediction, this paper assembled a new hybrid model containing the local mean decomposition (LMD), innovations state space models for exponential smoothing (ETS), and the temporal convolutional network (TCN). The proposed model, which is based on over 10 years of long-term time series monitoring GPS data, was tested on the selected case—stepwise Baijiabao landslide in the Three Gorges Reservoir area of China (TGRA) was tested by the proposed model. The results presented that the LMD–ETS–TCN model has the best performance in comparison with other benchmark models. Compared with autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), support vector regression (SVR), and long short-term memory neural network (LSTM), the accuracy was noticeably improved by an average of 40.9%, 46.2%, and 22.1%, respectively. The robustness and effectiveness of the presented approach are attested, and it has discernible improvements for landslide displacement prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gross floor area is defined as the product of number of building stories and its base area. Gross floor area acquisition is the core problem to estimate floor area ratio, which is an important indicator for many geographical analyses. High data acquisition cost or inherent defect of methods for existing gross floor area acquisition methods limit their applications in a wide range. In this paper we proposed three instance-wise gross floor area estimation methods in various degrees of end-to-end learning from monocular optical images based on the NoS R-CNN, which is a deep convolutional neural network to estimate the number of building stories. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to estimate instance-wise gross floor area from monocular optical satellite images. For comparing the performance of the proposed three methods, experiments on our dataset from nine cities in China were carried out, and the results were analyzed in detail in order to explore the reasons for the performance gap between the different methods. The results show that there is an inverse relationship between the model performance and the degree of end-to-end learning for base area estimation task and gross floor area estimation task. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the proposed methods indicate that the performances of proposed methods for accurate GFA estimation are promising for potential applications using large-scale remote sensing images. The proposed methods provide a new perspective for gross floor area/floor area ratio estimation and downstream tasks such as population estimation, living conditions assessment, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most devastating disasters to pine forests, pine wilt disease (PWD) has caused tremendous ecological and economic losses in China. An effective way to prevent large-scale PWD outbreaks is to detect and remove the damaged pine trees at the early stage of PWD infection. However, early infected pine trees do not show obvious changes in morphology or color in the visible wavelength range, making early detection of PWD tricky. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based hyperspectral imagery (HI) has great potential for early detection of PWD. However, the commonly used methods, such as the two-dimensional convolutional neural network (2D-CNN), fail to simultaneously extract and fully utilize the spatial and spectral information, whereas the three-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) is able to collect this information from raw hyperspectral data. In this paper, we applied the residual block to 3D-CNN and constructed a 3D-Res CNN model, the performance of which was then compared with that of 3D-CNN, 2D-CNN, and 2D-Res CNN in identifying PWD-infected pine trees from the hyperspectral images. The 3D-Res CNN model outperformed the other models, achieving an overall accuracy (OA) of 88.11% and an accuracy of 72.86% for detecting early infected pine trees (EIPs). Using only 20% of the training samples, the OA and EIP accuracy of 3D-Res CNN can still achieve 81.06% and 51.97%, which is superior to the state-of-the-art method in the early detection of PWD based on hyperspectral images. Collectively, 3D-Res CNN was more accurate and effective in early detection of PWD. In conclusion, 3D-Res CNN is proposed for early detection of PWD in this paper, making the prediction and control of PWD more accurate and effective. This model can also be applied to detect pine trees damaged by other diseases or insect pests in the forest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landslides pose a constant threat to the lives and property of mountain people and may also cause geomorphological destruction such as soil and water loss, vegetation destruction, and land cover change. Landslide susceptibility assessment (LSA) is a key component of landslide risk evaluation. There are many related studies, but few analyses and comparisons of models for optimization. This paper aims to introduce the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) algorithm for hyperparameter optimization of three typical neural network models for LSA in Shuicheng County, China, as an example, and to compare the differences of predictive ability among the models in order to achieve higher application performance. First, 17 influencing factors of landslide multiple data sources were selected for spatial prediction, hybrid ensemble oversampling and undersampling techniques were used to address the imbalanced sample and small sample size problem, and the samples were randomly divided into a training set and validation set. Second, deep neural network (DNN), recurrent neural network (RNN), and convolutional neural network (CNN) models were adopted to predict the regional landslides susceptibility, and the TPE algorithm was used to optimize the hyperparameters respectively to improve the assessment capacity. Finally, to compare the differences and optimization effects of these models, several objective measures were applied for validation. The results show that the high-susceptibility regions mostly distributed in bands along fault zones, where the lithology is mostly claystone, sandstone, and basalt. The DNN, RNN, and CNN models all perform well in LSA, especially the RNN model. The TPE optimization significantly improves the accuracy of the DNN and CNN (3.92% and 1.52%, respectively), but does not improve the performance of the RNN. In summary, our proposed RNN model and TPE-optimized DNN and CNN model have robust predictive capability for landslide susceptibility in the study area and can also be applied to other areas containing similar geological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural greenhouses (AGs) are an important component of modern facility agriculture, and accurately mapping and dynamically monitoring their distribution are necessary for agricultural scientific management and planning. Semantic segmentation can be adopted for AG extraction from remote sensing images. However, the feature maps obtained by traditional deep convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based segmentation algorithms blur spatial details and insufficient attention is usually paid to contextual representation. Meanwhile, the maintenance of the original morphological characteristics, especially the boundaries, is still a challenge for precise identification of AGs. To alleviate these problems, this paper proposes a novel network called high-resolution boundary refined network (HBRNet). In this method, we design a new backbone with multiple paths based on HRNetV2 aiming to preserve high spatial resolution and improve feature extraction capability, in which the Pyramid Cross Channel Attention (PCCA) module is embedded to residual blocks to strengthen the interaction of multiscale information. Moreover, the Spatial Enhancement (SE) module is employed to integrate the contextual information of different scales. In addition, we introduce the Spatial Gradient Variation (SGV) unit in the Boundary Refined (BR) module to couple the segmentation task and boundary learning task, so that they can share latent high-level semantics and interact with each other, and combine this with the joint loss to refine the boundary. In our study, GaoFen-2 remote sensing images in Shouguang City, Shandong Province, China are selected to make the AG dataset. The experimental results show that HBRNet demonstrates a significant improvement in segmentation performance up to an IoU score of 94.89%, implying that this approach has advantages and potential for precise identification of AGs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, lithological mapping techniques using hyperspectral remotely sensed imagery have developed rapidly. The processing chains using visible-near infrared (VNIR) and shortwave infrared (SWIR) hyperspectral data are proven to be available in practice. The thermal infrared (TIR) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum has considerable potential for mineral and lithology mapping. In particular, the abovementioned rocks at wavelengths of 8–12 μm were found to be discriminative, which can be seen as a characteristic to apply to lithology classification. Moreover, it was found that most of the lithology mapping and classification for hyperspectral thermal infrared data are still carried out by traditional spectral matching methods, which are not very reliable due to the complex diversity of geological lithology. In recent years, deep learning has made great achievements in hyperspectral imagery classification feature extraction. It usually captures abstract features through a multilayer network, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have received more attention due to their unique advantages. Hence, in this paper, lithology classification with CNNs was tested on thermal infrared hyperspectral data using a Thermal Airborne Spectrographic Imager (TASI) at three small sites in Liuyuan, Gansu Province, China. Three different CNN algorithms, including one-dimensional CNN (1-D CNN), two-dimensional CNN (2-D CNN) and three-dimensional CNN (3-D CNN), were implemented and compared to the six relevant state-of-the-art methods. At the three sites, the maximum overall accuracy (OA) based on CNNs was 94.70%, 96.47% and 98.56%, representing improvements of 22.58%, 25.93% and 16.88% over the worst OA. Meanwhile, the average accuracy of all classes (AA) and kappa coefficient (kappa) value were consistent with the OA, which confirmed that the focal method effectively improved accuracy and outperformed other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our society's growing need for mineral resources brings with it the associated risk of degrading our natural environment as well as impacting on neighboring communities. To better manage this risk, especially for open-pit mine (OM) operations, new earth observation tools are required for more accurate baseline mapping and subsequent monitoring. The purpose of this paper is to propose an object-oriented open-pit mine mapping (OOMM) framework from Gaofen-2 (GF-2) high-spatial resolution satellite image (HSRSI), based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To better present the different land use categories (LUCs) in the OM area, a minimum heterogeneity criterion-based multi-scale segmentation method was used, while a mean area ratio method was applied to optimize the segmentation scale of each LUC. After image segmentation, three object-feature domains were obtained based on the GF-2 HSRSI: spectral, texture, and geometric features. Then, the gradient boosting decision tree and Pearson correlation coefficient were used as an object feature information reduction (FIR) method to recognize the distinguishing feature that describe open-pit mines (OMs). Finally, the CNN was used by combing the significant features to map the OM. In total, 105 OM sites were extracted from the interpretation of GF-2 HSRSIs and the boundary of each OM was validated by field work and used as inputs to evaluate the open-pit mine mapping (OMM) accuracy. The results revealed that: (1) the FIR tool made a positive impact on effective OMM; (2) by splitting the segmented objects into two groups, training and testing sets which are composed of 70% of the objects, and validation sets which are formed by the remaining 30% of the objects, then combing the selected feature subsets for training to achieve an overall accuracy (OA) of 90.13% and a Kappa coefficient (KC) of 0.88 of the whole datasets; (3) comparing the results of the state-of-the-art method, support vector machine (SVM), in OMM, the proposed framework outperformed SVM by more than 7.28% in OA, 8.64% in KC, 6.15% in producer accuracy of OM and by 9.31% in user accuracy of OM. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that OM information has been used through the integration of multiscale segmentation of HSRSI with the CNN to get OMM results. The proposed framework can not only provide reliable technical support for the scientific management and environmental monitoring of open pit mining areas, but also be of wide generality and be applicable to other kinds of land use mapping in mining areas using HSR images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing image segmentation with samples imbalance is always one of the most important issues. Typically, a high-resolution remote sensing image has the characteristics of high spatial resolution and low spectral resolution, complex large-scale land covers, small class differences for some land covers, vague foreground, and imbalanced distribution of samples. However, traditional machine learning algorithms have limitations in deep image feature extraction and dealing with sample imbalance issue. In the paper, we proposed an improved full-convolution neural network, called DeepLab V3+, with loss function based solution of samples imbalance. In addition, we select Sentinel-2 remote sensing images covering the Yuli County, Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China as data sources, then a typical region image dataset is built by data augmentation. The experimental results show that the improved DeepLab V3+ model can not only utilize the spectral information of high-resolution remote sensing images, but also consider its rich spatial information. The classification accuracy of the proposed method on the test dataset reaches 97.97%. The mean Intersection-over-Union reaches 87.74%, and the Kappa coefficient 0.9587. The work provides methodological guidance to sample imbalance correction, and the established data resource can be a reference to further study in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]