scholarly journals Use of Hyper-Spectral Visible and Near-Infrared Satellite Data for Timely Estimates of the Earth’s Surface Reflectance in Cloudy Conditions: Part 2- Image Restoration With HICO Satellite Data in Overcast Conditions

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Joiner ◽  
Zachary Fasnacht ◽  
Bo-Cai Gao ◽  
Wenhan Qin

Satellite-based visible and near-infrared imaging of the Earth’s surface is generally not performed in moderate to highly cloudy conditions; images that look visibly cloud covered to the human eye are typically discarded. Here, we expand upon previous work that employed machine learning (ML) to estimate underlying land surface reflectances at red, green, and blue (RGB) wavelengths in cloud contaminated spectra using a low spatial resolution satellite spectrometer. Specifically, we apply the ML methodology to a case study at much higher spatial resolution with the Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean (HICO) that flew on the International Space Station (ISS). HICO spatial sampling is of the order of 90 m. The purpose of our case study is to test whether high spatial resolution features can be captured using hyper-spectral imaging in lightly cloudy and overcast conditions. We selected one clear and one cloudy image over a portion of the panhandle coastline of Florida to demonstrate that land features are partially recoverable in overcast conditions. Many high contrast features are well recovered in the presence of optically thin clouds. However, some of the low contrast features, such as narrow roads, are smeared out in the heavily clouded part of the reconstructed image. This case study demonstrates that our approach may be useful for many science and operational applications that are being developed for current and upcoming satellite missions including precision agriculture and natural vegetation analysis, water quality assessment, as well as disturbance, change, hazard, and disaster detection.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Joiner ◽  
Zachary Fasnacht ◽  
Bo-Cai Gao ◽  
Wenhan Qin

Satellite-based visible and near-infrared imaging of the Earth's surface is generally not performed in moderate to highly cloudy conditions; images that look visibly cloud covered to the human eye are typically discarded. Here, we expand upon previous work that employed machine learning (ML) to estimate underlying land surface reflectances at red, green, and blue (RGB) wavelengths in cloud contaminated spectra using a low spatial resolution satellite spectrometer. Specifically, we apply the ML methodology to a case study at much higher spatial resolution with the Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean (HICO) that flew on the International Space Station (ISS). HICO spatial sampling is of the order of 90 m. The purpose of our case study is to test whether high spatial resolution features can be captured using multi-spectral imaging in lightly cloudy and overcast conditions. We selected one clear and one cloudy image over a portion ofthe panhandle coastline of Florida to demonstrate that land features are partially recoverable in overcast conditions. Many high contrast features are well recovered in the presence of optically thin clouds. However, some of the low contrast features, such as narrow roads, are smeared out in the heavily clouded part of the reconstructed image. This case study demonstrates that our approach may be useful for many science and applications that are being developed for current and upcoming satellite missions including precision agriculture and natural vegetation analysis, water quality assessment as well as disturbance, change, hazard, and disaster detection.


2022 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Joiner ◽  
Z. Fasnacht ◽  
W. Qin ◽  
Y. Yoshida ◽  
A. P. Vasilkov ◽  
...  

Space-based quantitative passive optical remote sensing of the Earth’s surface typically involves the detection and elimination of cloud-contaminated pixels as an initial processing step. We explore a fundamentally different approach; we use machine learning with cloud contaminated satellite hyper-spectral data to estimate underlying terrestrial surface reflectances at red, green, and blue (RGB) wavelengths. An artificial neural network (NN) reproduces land RGB reflectances with high fidelity, even in scenes with moderate to high cloud optical thicknesses. This implies that spectral features of the Earth’s surface can be detected and distinguished in the presence of clouds, even when they are partially and visibly obscured by clouds; the NN is able to separate the spectral fingerprint of the Earth’s surface from that of the clouds, aerosols, gaseous absorption, and Rayleigh scattering, provided that there are adequately different spectral features and that the clouds are not completely opaque. Once trained, the NN enables rapid estimates of RGB reflectances with little computational cost. Aside from the training data, there is no requirement of prior information regarding the land surface spectral reflectance, nor is there need for radiative transfer calculations. We test different wavelength windows and instrument configurations for reconstruction of surface reflectances. This work provides an initial example of a general approach that has many potential applications in land and ocean remote sensing as well as other practical uses such as in search and rescue, precision agriculture, and change detection.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (19) ◽  
pp. 2304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Huryna ◽  
Yafit Cohen ◽  
Arnon Karnieli ◽  
Natalya Panov ◽  
William P. Kustas ◽  
...  

A spatially distributed land surface temperature is important for many studies. The recent launch of the Sentinel satellite programs paves the way for an abundance of opportunities for both large area and long-term investigations. However, the spatial resolution of Sentinel-3 thermal images is not suitable for monitoring small fragmented fields. Thermal sharpening is one of the primary methods used to obtain thermal images at finer spatial resolution at a daily revisit time. In the current study, the utility of the TsHARP method to sharpen the low resolution of Sentinel-3 thermal data was examined using Sentinel-2 visible-near infrared imagery. Compared to Landsat 8 fine thermal images, the sharpening resulted in mean absolute errors of ~1 °C, with errors increasing as the difference between the native and the target resolutions increases. Part of the error is attributed to the discrepancy between the thermal images acquired by the two platforms. Further research is due to test additional sites and conditions, and potentially additional sharpening methods, applied to the Sentinel platforms.


Author(s):  
K. Mishra ◽  
A. Siddiqui ◽  
V. Kumar

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Urban areas despite being heterogeneous in nature are characterized as mixed pixels in medium to coarse resolution imagery which renders their mapping as highly inaccurate. A detailed classification of urban areas therefore needs both high spatial and spectral resolution marking the essentiality of different satellite data. Hyperspectral sensors with more than 200 contiguous bands over a narrow bandwidth of 1&amp;ndash;10<span class="thinspace"></span>nm can distinguish identical land use classes. However, such sensors possess low spatial resolution. As the exchange of rich spectral and spatial information is difficult at hardware level resolution enhancement techniques like super resolution (SR) hold the key. SR preserves the spectral characteristics and enables feature visualization at a higher spatial scale. Two SR algorithms: Anchored Neighbourhood Regression (ANR) and Sparse Regression and Natural Prior (SRP) have been executed on an airborne hyperspectral scene of Advanced Visible/Near Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG) for the mixed environment centred on Kankaria Lake in the city of Ahmedabad thereby bringing down the spatial resolution from 8.1<span class="thinspace"></span>m to 4.05<span class="thinspace"></span>m. The generated super resolved outputs have been then used to map ten urban material and land cover classes identified in the study area using supervised Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification methods. Visual comparison and accuracy assessment on the basis of confusion matrix and Pearson’s Kappa coefficient revealed that SRP super-resolved output classified using radial basis function (RBF) kernel based SVM is the best outcome thereby highlighting the superiority of SR over simple scaling up and resampling approaches.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Filipponi

Satellite data play a major role in supporting knowledge about fire severity by delivering rapid information to map fire-damaged areas in a precise and prompt way. The high availability of free medium-high spatial resolution optical satellite data, offered by the Copernicus Programme, has enabled the development of more detailed post-fire mapping. This research study deals with the exploitation of Sentinel-2 time series to map burned areas, taking advantages from the high revisit frequency and improved spatial and spectral resolution of the MSI optical sensor. A novel procedure is here presented to produce medium-high spatial resolution burned area mapping using dense Sentinel-2 time series with no a priori knowledge about wildfire occurrence or burned areas spatial distribution. The proposed methodology is founded on a threshold-based classification based on empirical observations that discovers wildfire fingerprints on vegetation cover by means of an abrupt change detection procedure. Effectiveness of the procedure in mapping medium-high spatial resolution burned areas at the national level was demonstrated for a case study on the 2017 Italy wildfires. Thematic maps generated under the Copernicus Emergency Management Service were used as reference products to assess the accuracy of the results. Multitemporal series of three different spectral indices, describing wildfire disturbance, were used to identify burned areas and compared to identify their performances in terms of spectral separability. Result showed a total burned area for the Italian country in the year 2017 of around 1400 km2, with the proposed methodology generating a commission error of around 25% and an omission error of around 40%. Results demonstrate how the proposed procedure allows for the medium-high resolution mapping of burned areas, offering a benchmark for the development of new operational downstreaming services at the national level based on Copernicus data for the systematic monitoring of wildfires.


Author(s):  
S. Yu. Blokhina

The paper provides an overview of foreign literature on the remote sensing applications in precision agriculture. Remote sensing applications in precision agriculture began with sensors for soil organic matter content, and have quickly advanced to include hand held sensors to tractor or aerial or satellite mounted sensors. Wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation initially focused on a few key visible or near infrared bands, and nowadays electromagnetic wavelengths in use range from the ultraviolet to microwave portions of the spectrum. Spectral bandwidth has decreased dramatically with the advent of hyperspectral remote sensing, allowing improved analysis of crop stress, crop biophysical or biochemical characteristics and specific compounds. A variety of spectral indices have been widely implemented within various precision agriculture applications, rather than a focus on only normalized difference vegetation indices. Spatial resolution and temporal frequency of remote sensing imagery has increased significantly, allowing evaluation of soil and crop properties at fine spatial resolution at the expense of increased data storage and processing requirements. At present there is considerable interest in collecting remote sensing for operational management of soil and crop yields, as well as control over the spread of pests and weeds practically in real time.


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