scholarly journals A New Fusion Approach for Extracting Urban Built-up Areas from Multisource Remotely Sensed Data

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 2516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaolong Ma ◽  
Chengming Li ◽  
Xiaohua Tong ◽  
Sicong Liu

Recent advances in the fusion technology of remotely sensed data have led to an increased availability of extracted urban information from multiple spatial resolutions and multi-temporal acquisitions. Despite the existing extraction methods, there remains the challenging task of fully exploiting the characteristics of multisource remote sensing data, each of which has its own advantages. In this paper, a new fusion approach for accurately extracting urban built-up areas based on the use of multisource remotely sensed data, i.e., the DMSP-OLS nighttime light data, the MODIS land cover product (MCD12Q1) and Landsat 7 ETM+ images, was proposed. The proposed method mainly consists of two components: (1) the multi-level data fusion, including the initial sample selection, unified pixel resolution and feature weighted calculation at the feature level, as well as pixel attribution determination at decision level; and (2) the optimized sample selection with multi-factor constraints, which indicates that an iterative optimization with the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), the modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI), and the bare soil index (BSI), along with the sample training of the support vector machine (SVM) and the extraction of urban built-up areas, produces results with high credibility. Nine Chinese provincial capitals along the Silk Road Economic Belt, such as Chengdu, Chongqing, Kunming, Xining, and Nanning, were selected to test the proposed method with data from 2001 to 2010. Compared with the results obtained by the traditional threshold dichotomy and the improved neighborhood focal statistics (NFS) method, the following could be concluded. (1) The proposed approach achieved high accuracy and eliminated natural elements to a great extent while obtaining extraction results very consistent to those of the more precise improved NFS approach at a fine scale. The average overall accuracy (OA) and average Kappa values of the extracted urban built-up areas were 95% and 0.83, respectively. (2) The proposed method not only identified the characteristics of the urban built-up area from the nighttime light data and other daylight images at the feature level but also optimized the samples of the urban built-up area category at the decision level, making it possible to provide valuable information for urban planning, construction, and management with high accuracy.

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaole Ji ◽  
Xinze Li ◽  
Yaqian He ◽  
Xiaolong Liu

County-level economic statistics estimation using remotely sensed data, such as nighttime light data, has various advantages over traditional methods. However, uncertainties in remotely sensed data, such as the saturation problem of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) NSL (nighttime stable lights) data, may influence the accuracy of this remote sensing-based method, and thus hinder its use. This study proposes a simple method to address the saturation phenomenon of nighttime light data using the GDP growth rate. Compared with other methods, the NSL data statistics obtained using the new method reflect the development of economics more accurately. We use this method to calibrate the DMSP-OLS NSL data from 1992 to 2013 to obtain the NSL density data for each county and linearly regress them with economic statistics from 2004 to 2013. Regression results show that lighting data is highly correlated with economic data. We then use the light data to further estimate the county-level GDP, and find that the estimated GDP is consistent with the authoritative GDP statistics. Our approach provides a reliable way to capture county-level economic development in different regions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 814
Author(s):  
Pedro Vilar ◽  
Tiago G. Morais ◽  
Nuno R. Rodrigues ◽  
Ivo Gama ◽  
Marta L. Monteiro ◽  
...  

Sown Biodiverse Pastures (SBP) are the basis of a high-yield grazing system tailored for Mediterranean ecosystems and widely implemented in Southern Portugal. The application of precision farming methods in SBP requires cost-effective monitoring using remote sensing (RS). The main hurdle for the remote monitoring of SBP is the fact that the bulk of the pastures are installed in open Montado agroforestry systems. Sparsely distributed trees cast shadows that hinder the identification of the underlaying pasture using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) imagery. Image acquisition in the Spring is made difficult by the presence of flowers that mislead the classification algorithms. Here, we tested multiple procedures for the geographical, object-based image classification (GEOBIA) of SBP, aiming to reduce the effects of tree shadows and flowers in open Montado systems. We used remotely sensed data acquired between November 2017 and May 2018 in three Portuguese farms. We used three machine learning supervised classification algorithms: Random Forests (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). We classified SBP based on: (1) a single-period image for the maximum Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) epoch in each of the three farms, and (2) multi-temporal image stacking. RF, SVM and ANN were trained using some visible (red, green and blue bands) and near-infrared (NIR) reflectance bands, plus NDVI and a Digital Surface Model (DSM). We obtained high overall accuracy and kappa index (higher than 79% and 0.60, respectively). The RF algorithm had the highest overall accuracy (more than 92%) for all farms. Multitemporal image classification increased the accuracy of the algorithms. as it helped to correctly identify as SBP the areas covered by tree shadows and flower patches, which would be misclassified using single image classification. This study thus established the first workflow for SBP monitoring based on remotely sensed data, suggesting an operational approach for SBP identification. The workflow can be applied to other types of pastures in agroforestry regions to reduce the effects of shadows and flowering in classification problems.


2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Z. M. Hu ◽  
S. G. Li ◽  
J. W. Dong ◽  
J. W. Fan

The spatial annual patterns of aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) and precipitation-use efficiency (PUE) of the rangelands of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China, a region in which several projects for ecosystem restoration had been implemented, are described for the years 1998–2007. Remotely sensed normalised difference vegetation index and ANPP data, measured in situ, were integrated to allow the prediction of ANPP and PUE in each 1 km2 of the 12 prefectures of Inner Mongolia. Furthermore, the temporal dynamics of PUE and ANPP residuals, as indicators of ecosystem deterioration and recovery, were investigated for the region and each prefecture. In general, both ANPP and PUE were positively correlated with mean annual precipitation, i.e. ANPP and PUE were higher in wet regions than in arid regions. Both PUE and ANPP residuals indicated that the state of the rangelands of the region were generally improving during the period of 2000–05, but declined by 2007 to that found in 1999. Among the four main grassland-dominated prefectures, the recovery in the state of the grasslands in the Erdos and Chifeng prefectures was highest, and Xilin Gol and Chifeng prefectures was 2 years earlier than Erdos and Hunlu Buir prefectures. The study demonstrated that the use of PUE or ANPP residuals has some limitations and it is proposed that both indices should be used together with relatively long-term datasets in order to maximise the reliability of the assessments.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 1837 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Brinkhoff ◽  
Brian W. Dunn ◽  
Andrew J. Robson ◽  
Tina S. Dunn ◽  
Remy L. Dehaan

Mid-season nitrogen (N) application in rice crops can maximize yield and profitability. This requires accurate and efficient methods of determining rice N uptake in order to prescribe optimal N amounts for topdressing. This study aims to determine the accuracy of using remotely sensed multispectral data from satellites to predict N uptake of rice at the panicle initiation (PI) growth stage, with a view to providing optimum variable-rate N topdressing prescriptions without needing physical sampling. Field experiments over 4 years, 4–6 N rates, 4 varieties and 2 sites were conducted, with at least 3 replicates of each plot. One WorldView satellite image for each year was acquired, close to the date of PI. Numerous single- and multi-variable models were investigated. Among single-variable models, the square of the NDRE vegetation index was shown to be a good predictor of N uptake (R 2 = 0.75, RMSE = 22.8 kg/ha for data pooled from all years and experiments). For multi-variable models, Lasso regularization was used to ensure an interpretable and compact model was chosen and to avoid over fitting. Combinations of remotely sensed reflectances and spectral indexes as well as variety, climate and management data as input variables for model training achieved R 2 < 0.9 and RMSE < 15 kg/ha for the pooled data set. The ability of remotely sensed data to predict N uptake in new seasons where no physical sample data has yet been obtained was tested. A methodology to extract models that generalize well to new seasons was developed, avoiding model overfitting. Lasso regularization selected four or less input variables, and yielded R 2 of better than 0.67 and RMSE better than 27.4 kg/ha over four test seasons that weren’t used to train the models.


2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatriz Martinez ◽  
F. Camacho-de Coca ◽  
Joan Garcia-Haro ◽  
M. A. Gilabert

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (22) ◽  
pp. 3810
Author(s):  
Xiuxiu Chen ◽  
Feng Zhang ◽  
Zhenhong Du ◽  
Renyi Liu

An accelerating trend of global urbanization accompanying various environmental and urban issues makes frequently urban mapping. Nighttime light data (NTL) has shown great advantages in urban mapping at regional and global scales over long time series because of its appropriate spatial and temporal resolution, free access, and global coverage. However, the existing urban extent extraction methods based on nighttime light data rely on auxiliary data and training samples, which require labor and time for data preparation, leading to the difficulty to extract urban extent at a large scale. This study seeks to develop an unsupervised method to extract urban extent from nighttime light data rapidly and accurately without ancillary data. The clustering algorithm is applied to segment urban areas from the background and multi-scale spatial context constraints are utilized to reduce errors arising from the low brightness areas and increase detail information in urban edge district. Firstly, the urban edge district is detected using spatial context constrained clustering, and the NTL image is divided into urban interior district, urban edge district and non-urban interior district. Secondly, the urban edge pixels are classified by an adaptive direction filtering clustering. Finally, the full urban extent is obtained by merging the urban inner pixels and the urban pixels in urban edge district. The proposed method was validated using the urban extents of 25 Chinese cities, obtained by Landsat8 images and compared with two common methods, the local-optimized threshold method (LOT) and the integrated night light, normalized vegetation index, and surface temperature support vector machine classification method (INNL-SVM). The Kappa coefficient ranged from 0.687 to 0.829 with an average of 0.7686 (1.80% higher than LOT and 4.88% higher than INNL-SVM). The results in this study show that the proposed method is a reliable and efficient method for extracting urban extent with high accuracy and simple operation. These imply the significant potential for urban mapping and urban expansion research at regional and global scales automatically and accurately.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Pollino ◽  
Sergio Cappucci ◽  
Ludovica Giordano ◽  
Domenico Iantosca ◽  
Luigi De Cecco ◽  
...  

Earthquake-induced rubble in urbanized areas must be mapped and characterized. Location, volume, weight and constituents are key information in order to support emergency activities and optimize rubble management. A procedure to work out the geometric characteristics of the rubble heaps has already been reported in a previous work, whereas here an original methodology for retrieving the rubble’s constituents by means of active and passive remote sensing techniques, based on airborne (LiDAR and RGB aero-photogrammetric) and satellite (WorldView-3) Very High Resolution (VHR) sensors, is presented. Due to the high spectral heterogeneity of seismic rubble, Spectral Mixture Analysis, through the Sequential Maximum Angle Convex Cone algorithm, was adopted to derive the linear mixed model distribution of remotely sensed spectral responses of pure materials (endmembers). These endmembers were then mapped on the hyperspectral signatures of various materials acquired on site, testing different machine learning classifiers in order to assess their relative abundances. The best results were provided by the C-Support Vector Machine, which allowed us to work out the characterization of the main rubble constituents with an accuracy up to 88.8% for less mixed pixels and the Random Forest, which was the only one able to detect the likely presence of asbestos.


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