A Digital Terrain Modeling Method in Urban Areas by the ICESat-2 (Generating precise terrain surface profiles from photon-counting technology)

2021 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 237-248
Author(s):  
Nahed Osama ◽  
Bisheng Yang ◽  
Yue Ma ◽  
Mohamed Freeshah

The ICE, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICES at-2) can provide new measurements of the Earth's elevations through photon-counting technology. Most research has focused on extracting the ground and the canopy photons in vegetated areas. Yet the extraction of the ground photons from urban areas, where the vegetation is mixed with artificial constructions, has not been fully investigated. This article proposes a new method to estimate the ground surface elevations in urban areas. The ICES at-2 signal photons were detected by the improved Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise algorithm and the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System algorithm. The Advanced Land Observing Satellite-1 PALSAR –derived digital surface model has been utilized to separate the terrain surface from the ICES at-2 data. A set of ground-truth data was used to evaluate the accuracy of these two methods, and the achieved accuracy was up to 2.7 cm, which makes our method effective and accurate in determining the ground elevation in urban scenes.

Author(s):  
K. Moe ◽  
I. Toschi ◽  
D. Poli ◽  
F. Lago ◽  
C. Schreiner ◽  
...  

This paper discusses the potential of current photogrammetric multi-head oblique cameras, such as UltraCam Osprey, to improve the efficiency of standard photogrammetric methods for surveying applications like inventory surveys and topographic mapping for public administrations or private customers. <br><br> In 2015, Terra Messflug (TM), a subsidiary of Vermessung AVT ZT GmbH (Imst, Austria), has flown a number of urban areas in Austria, Czech Republic and Hungary with an UltraCam Osprey Prime multi-head camera system from Vexcel Imaging. In collaboration with FBK Trento (Italy), the data acquired at Imst (a small town in Tyrol, Austria) were analysed and processed to extract precise 3D topographic information. The Imst block comprises 780 images and covers an area of approx. 4.5 km by 1.5 km. Ground truth data is provided in the form of 6 GCPs and several check points surveyed with RTK GNSS. Besides, 3D building data obtained by photogrammetric stereo plotting from a 5 cm nadir flight and a LiDAR point cloud with 10 to 20 measurements per m² are available as reference data or for comparison. The photogrammetric workflow, from flight planning to Dense Image Matching (DIM) and 3D building extraction, is described together with the achieved accuracy. For each step, the differences and innovation with respect to standard photogrammetric procedures based on nadir images are shown, including high overlaps, improved vertical accuracy, and visibility of areas masked in the standard vertical views. Finally the advantages of using oblique images for inventory surveys are demonstrated.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renato Andrade ◽  
Ana Alves ◽  
Carlos Bento

The modern planning and management of urban spaces is an essential topic for smart cities and depends on up-to-date and reliable information on land use and the functional roles of the places that integrate urban areas. In the last few years, driven by the increased availability of geo-referenced data from social media, embedded sensors, and remote sensing images, various techniques have become popular for land use analysis. In this paper, we first highlight and discuss the different data types and methods usually adopted in this context, as well as their purposes. Then, based on a systematic state-of-the-art study, we focused on exploring the potential of points of interest (POIs) for land use classification, as one of the most common categories of crowdsourced data. We developed an application to automatically collect POIs for the study area, creating a dataset that was used to generate a large number of features. We used a ranking technique to select, among them, the most suitable features for classifying land use. As ground truth data, we used CORINE Land Cover (CLC), which is a solid and reliable dataset available for the whole European territory. It was used an artificial neural network (ANN) in different scenarios and our results reveal values of more than 90% for the accuracy and F-score in one experiment performed. Our analysis suggests that POI data have promising potential to characterize geographic spaces. The work described here aims to provide an alternative to the current methodologies for land use and land cover (LULC) classification, which are usually time-consuming and depend on expensive data types.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 4511
Author(s):  
Hui Zhang ◽  
Zhixin Qi ◽  
Xia Li ◽  
Yimin Chen ◽  
Xianwei Wang ◽  
...  

Urban flooding causes a variation in radar return from urban areas. However, such variation has not been thoroughly examined for different polarizations because of the lack of polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) images and ground truth data simultaneously collected over flooded urban areas. This condition hinders not only the understanding of the effect mechanism of urban flooding under different polarizations but also the development of advanced methods that could improve the accuracy of inundated urban area detection. Using Sentinel-1 PolSAR and Jilin-1 high-resolution optical images acquired on the same day over flooded urban areas in Golestan, Iran, this study investigated the characteristics and mechanisms of the radar return changes induced by urban flooding under different polarizations and proposed a new method for unsupervised inundated urban area detection. This study found that urban flooding caused a backscattering coefficient increase (BCI) and interferometric coherence decrease (ICD) in VV and VH polarizations. Furthermore, VV polarization was more sensitive to the BCI and ICD than VH polarization. In light of these findings, the ratio between the BCI and ICD was defined as an urban flooding index (UFI), and the UFI in VV polarization was used for the unsupervised detection of flooded urban areas. The overall accuracy, detection accuracy, and false alarm rate attained by the UFI-based method were 96.93%, 91.09%, and 0.95%, respectively. Compared with the conventional unsupervised method based on the ICD and that based on the fusion of backscattering coefficients and interferometric coherences (FBI), the UFI-based method achieved higher overall accuracy. The performance of VV was evaluated and compared to that of VH in the flooded urban area detection using the UFI-, ICD-, and FBI-based methods, respectively. VV polarization produced higher overall accuracy than VH polarization in all the methods, especially in the UFI-based method. By using VV instead of VH polarization, the UFI-based method improved the detection accuracy by 38.16%. These results indicated that the UFI-based method improved flooded urban area detection by synergizing the BCI and ICD in VV polarization.


Author(s):  
S. A. R. Hosseini ◽  
H. Gholami ◽  
Y. Esmaeilpoor

Abstract. Land use/land cover (LULC) changes have become a central issue in current global change and sustainability research. Due to the large expanse of land change detection by the traditional methods is not sufficient and efficient; therefore, using of new methods such as remote sensing technology is necessary and vital This study evaluates LULC change in chabahar and konarak Coastal deserts, located in south of sistan and baluchestan province from 1988 to 2018 using Landsat images. Maximum likelihood classification were used to develop LULC maps. The change detection was executed using post-classification comparison and GIS. Then, taking ground truth data, the classified maps accuracy were assessed by calculating the Kappa coefficient and overall accuracy. The results for the time period of 1988–2018 are presented. Based on the results of the 30-year time period, vegetation has been decreased in area while urban areas have been developed. The area of saline and sandy lands has also increased.


2015 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 209-215
Author(s):  
B. Jaehn ◽  
P. Lindner ◽  
G. Wanielik

Abstract. A key component for automated driving is 360° environment detection. The recognition capabilities of modern sensors are always limited to their direct field of view. In urban areas a lot of objects occlude important areas of interest. The information captured by another sensor from another perspective could solve such occluded situations. Furthermore, the capabilities to detect and classify various objects in the surrounding can be improved by taking multiple views into account. In order to combine the data of two sensors into one coordinate system, a rigid transformation matrix has to be derived. The accuracy of modern e.g. satellite based relative pose estimation systems is not sufficient to guarantee a suitable alignment. Therefore, a registration based approach is used in this work which aligns the captured environment data of two sensors from different positions. Thus their relative pose estimation obtained by traditional methods is improved and the data can be fused. To support this we present an approach which utilizes the uncertainty information of modern tracking systems to determine the possible field of view of the other sensor. Furthermore, it is estimated which parts of the captured data is directly visible to both, taking occlusion and shadowing effects into account. Afterwards a registration method, based on the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm, is applied to that data in order to get an accurate alignment. The contribution of the presented approch to the achievable accuracy is shown with the help of ground truth data from a LiDAR simulation within a 3-D crossroad model. Results show that a two dimensional position and heading estimation is sufficient to initialize a successful 3-D registration process. Furthermore it is shown which initial spatial alignment is necessary to obtain suitable registration results.


Author(s):  
I. Papila ◽  
U. Alganci ◽  
E. Sertel

Abstract. This study presents a semi-automatic algorithm for mapping floods. Both Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are used to observe the flood that hit the Cukurova region of Adana (Turkey) in 2019. The performance of the interferometric coherence in complementing intensity component of SAR data is investigated for mapping the floods occurred in agricultural and urban environments. There was no ground truth data available from the flooded area, thus classification result of optical satellite image is used as a seed for the region growing algorithm that defines the classes according to a threshold value. The advantage of using both intensity and coherence change detection is verified with the results. The results have been evaluated through very high-resolution SPOT-6 optical image which acquired simultaneously with Sentinel-1B SAR image. The comparison with the SPOT-6 data results shows that the proposed approach can map flooded areas with acceptable accuracy using the SAR data from Sentinel-1 satellite mission. Highly affected agricultural areas along with the river line could be mapped both by optical and SAR analysis. Comparison of results from VV and VH polarization provided that cross-polarization VH has a very little effect on flood mapping. The proposed algorithm successfully distinguishes the classes among the affected region, especially in urban areas.


Author(s):  
K. Moe ◽  
I. Toschi ◽  
D. Poli ◽  
F. Lago ◽  
C. Schreiner ◽  
...  

This paper discusses the potential of current photogrammetric multi-head oblique cameras, such as UltraCam Osprey, to improve the efficiency of standard photogrammetric methods for surveying applications like inventory surveys and topographic mapping for public administrations or private customers. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt; In 2015, Terra Messflug (TM), a subsidiary of Vermessung AVT ZT GmbH (Imst, Austria), has flown a number of urban areas in Austria, Czech Republic and Hungary with an UltraCam Osprey Prime multi-head camera system from Vexcel Imaging. In collaboration with FBK Trento (Italy), the data acquired at Imst (a small town in Tyrol, Austria) were analysed and processed to extract precise 3D topographic information. The Imst block comprises 780 images and covers an area of approx. 4.5 km by 1.5 km. Ground truth data is provided in the form of 6 GCPs and several check points surveyed with RTK GNSS. Besides, 3D building data obtained by photogrammetric stereo plotting from a 5 cm nadir flight and a LiDAR point cloud with 10 to 20 measurements per m² are available as reference data or for comparison. The photogrammetric workflow, from flight planning to Dense Image Matching (DIM) and 3D building extraction, is described together with the achieved accuracy. For each step, the differences and innovation with respect to standard photogrammetric procedures based on nadir images are shown, including high overlaps, improved vertical accuracy, and visibility of areas masked in the standard vertical views. Finally the advantages of using oblique images for inventory surveys are demonstrated.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noha Medhat ◽  
Masa-yuki Yamamoto ◽  
Gad El-Qady

&lt;p&gt;Land deformation due to natural and anthropogenic impacts considered to be one of the challenging environmental problems in the Aswan area located in the southern part of Egypt. Specifically, we applied multi-sensor analysis in order to record the slow rate of subsidence with a high spatial resolution of COSMO-SkyMed (X-band) and Sentinel-1 TOPSAR (C-band) scenes. We proposed multi-temporal DInSAR data analysis by means of ascending and descending orbit tracks during the recent time period of 2012-2017. The stacked DInSAR results reported the occurrence of land subsidence of active urban areas. A strong correlation between the ground truth data, ground leveling, and the estimated Line of Sight (LOS) displacement time series values are reached, assuming the ground deformation controlled by seasonal surface water loading, lithological units, and subsurface water activity. The detection of short-term displacement highlights the priority of groundwater management plans in the affected urban areas.&lt;/p&gt;


Author(s):  
K. Bittner ◽  
S. Cui ◽  
P. Reinartz

Building detection and footprint extraction are highly demanded for many remote sensing applications. Though most previous works have shown promising results, the automatic extraction of building footprints still remains a nontrivial topic, especially in complex urban areas. Recently developed extensions of the CNN framework made it possible to perform dense pixel-wise classification of input images. Based on these abilities we propose a methodology, which automatically generates a full resolution binary building mask out of a <i>Digital Surface Model (DSM)</i> using a Fully Convolution Network (FCN) architecture. The advantage of using the depth information is that it provides geometrical silhouettes and allows a better separation of buildings from background as well as through its invariance to illumination and color variations. The proposed framework has mainly two steps. Firstly, the FCN is trained on a large set of patches consisting of normalized DSM (nDSM) as inputs and available ground truth building mask as target outputs. Secondly, the generated predictions from FCN are viewed as unary terms for a Fully connected Conditional Random Fields (FCRF), which enables us to create a final binary building mask. A series of experiments demonstrate that our methodology is able to extract accurate building footprints which are close to the buildings original shapes to a high degree. The quantitative and qualitative analysis show the significant improvements of the results in contrast to the multy-layer fully connected network from our previous work.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 1966
Author(s):  
Christopher W Smith ◽  
Santosh K Panda ◽  
Uma S Bhatt ◽  
Franz J Meyer ◽  
Anushree Badola ◽  
...  

In recent years, there have been rapid improvements in both remote sensing methods and satellite image availability that have the potential to massively improve burn severity assessments of the Alaskan boreal forest. In this study, we utilized recent pre- and post-fire Sentinel-2 satellite imagery of the 2019 Nugget Creek and Shovel Creek burn scars located in Interior Alaska to both assess burn severity across the burn scars and test the effectiveness of several remote sensing methods for generating accurate map products: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), and Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) supervised classification. We used 52 Composite Burn Index (CBI) plots from the Shovel Creek burn scar and 28 from the Nugget Creek burn scar for training classifiers and product validation. For the Shovel Creek burn scar, the RF and SVM machine learning (ML) classification methods outperformed the traditional spectral indices that use linear regression to separate burn severity classes (RF and SVM accuracy, 83.33%, versus NBR accuracy, 73.08%). However, for the Nugget Creek burn scar, the NDVI product (accuracy: 96%) outperformed the other indices and ML classifiers. In this study, we demonstrated that when sufficient ground truth data is available, the ML classifiers can be very effective for reliable mapping of burn severity in the Alaskan boreal forest. Since the performance of ML classifiers are dependent on the quantity of ground truth data, when sufficient ground truth data is available, the ML classification methods would be better at assessing burn severity, whereas with limited ground truth data the traditional spectral indices would be better suited. We also looked at the relationship between burn severity, fuel type, and topography (aspect and slope) and found that the relationship is site-dependent.


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