scholarly journals Inter-Seasonal Time Series Imagery Enhances Classification Accuracy of Grazing Resource and Land Degradation Maps in a Savanna Ecosystem

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick D.L. Hunter ◽  
Edward T.A. Mitchard ◽  
Peter Tyrrell ◽  
Samantha Russell

In savannas, mapping grazing resources and indicators of land degradation is important for assessing ecosystem conditions and informing grazing and land management decisions. We investigated the effects of classifiers and used time series imagery—images acquired within and across seasons—on the accuracy of plant species maps. The study site was a grazed savanna in southern Kenya. We used Sentinel-2 multi-spectral imagery due to its high spatial (10–20 m) and temporal (five days) resolution with support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) classifiers. The species mapped were important for grazing livestock and wildlife (three grass species), indicators of land degradation (one tree genus and one invasive shrub), and a fig tree species. The results show that increasing the number of images, including dry season imagery, results in improved classification accuracy regardless of the classifier (average increase in overall accuracy (OA) = 0.1632). SVM consistently outperformed RF, and the most accurate model and was SVM with a radial kernel using imagery from both wet and dry seasons (OA = 0.8217). Maps showed that seasonal grazing areas provide functionally different grazing opportunities and have different vegetation characteristics that are critical to a landscape’s ability to support large populations of both livestock and wildlife. This study highlights the potential of multi-spectral satellite imagery for species-level mapping of savannas.

Author(s):  
E. Elmoussaoui ◽  
A. Moumni ◽  
A. Lahrouni

Abstract. Forest tree species mapping became easier due to the global availability of high spatio-temporal resolution images acquired from multiple sensors. Such data can lead to better forest resources management. Machine-learning pixel based analysis was performed to multi-spectral Sentinel-2 and Synthetic Aperture Radar Sentinel-1 time series integrated with Digital Elevation Model acquired over Argan forest of Essaouira province, Morocco. The argan tree constitutes a fundamental resource for the populations of this arid area of Morocco. This research aims to use the potential of the combination of multi-sensor data to detect, map and identify argan tree from other forest species using three Machine Learning algorithms: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The exploited datasets included Sentinel-1 (S1), Sentinel-2 (S2) time series, Shuttle Radar Topographic Missing Digital Elevation Model (DEM) layer and Ground truth data. We tested several sets of scenarios, including single S1 derived features, single S2 time series and combined S1 and S2 derived layers with DEM scene acquisition. The best results (overall accuracy OA and Kappa coefficient K) obtained from time series of optical data (NDVI): OA = 86.87%, K = 0.84, from time series of SAR data (VV+VH/VV): OA = 45.90%, K = 0.36, from the combination of optical and SAR time series (NDVI+VH+DEM): OA = 93.01%, K = 0.914, and from the fusion of optical time series and DEM layer (NDVI+DEM): OA = 93.25%, K = 0.91. These results indicate that single-sensor (S2) integrated with the DEM layer led us to obtain the highest classification results.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (17) ◽  
pp. 3488
Author(s):  
Keren Goldberg ◽  
Ittai Herrmann ◽  
Uri Hochberg ◽  
Offer Rozenstein

The overarching aim of this research was to develop a method for deriving crop maps from a time series of Sentinel-2 images between 2017 and 2018 to address global challenges in agriculture and food security. This study is the first step towards improving crop mapping based on phenological features retrieved from an object-based time series on a national scale. Five main crops in Israel were classified: wheat, barley, cotton, carrot, and chickpea. To optimize the object-based classification process, different characteristics and inputs of the mean shift segmentation algorithm were tested, including vegetation indices, three-band combinations, and high/low emphasis on the spatial and spectral characteristics. Four known vegetation indices (VIs)-based time series were tested. Additionally, we compared two widely used machine learning methods for crop classification, support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF), in addition to a newer classifier, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). Lastly, we examined two accuracy measures—overall accuracy (OA) and area under the curve (AUC)—in order to optimally estimate the accuracy in the case of imbalanced class representation. Mean shift best performed when emphasizing both the spectral and spatial characteristics while using the green, red, and near-infrared (NIR) bands as input. Both accuracy measures showed that RF and XGBoost classified different types of crops with significantly greater success than achieved by SVM. Nevertheless, AUC was better able to represent the significant differences between the classification algorithms than OA was. None of the VIs showed a significantly higher contribution to the classification. However, normalized difference infrared index (NDII) with XGBoost classifier showed the highest AUC results (88%). This study demonstrates that the short-wave infrared (SWIR) band with XGBoost improves crop type classification results. Furthermore, the study emphasizes the importance of addressing imbalanced classification datasets by using a proper accuracy measure. Since object-based classification and phenological features derived from a VI-based time series are widely used to produce crop maps, the current study is also relevant for operational agricultural management and informatics at large scales.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Zizala

<p>Previous studies have shown that remote sensing data can be very useful input into soil prediction models. This input usually represents reflectance from bare soils, which, however, make up only a small part of the total area in a given part of the year. For eliminating masking effect of vegetation time series of individual images (Žížala et al. 2019; Shabou et al. 2015; Demattê et al. 2016; Blasch et al. 2015a) or multitemporal composites of spectral data can be used. Exposed Soil Composite Mapping Processor (SCMaP) (Rogge et al. 2018), Geospatial Soil Sensing System (GEOS3) (Demattê et al. 2018), Bare Soil Composite Image (Gallo et al. 2018), and Barest Pixel Composite for Agricultural Areas (Diek et al. 2017), all developed from Landsat time series, multitemporal bare soil image developed from RapidEye time series (Blasch et al. 2015b), or bare soil mosaic (Loiseau et al. 2019) derived from Sentinel-2 data can serve as examples of such composites. However, only some of the composite products have been used yet to predict soil properties. Promising results were achieved; however, the potential of these spectral composites has not yet been tested in a relevant number of studies. Further research is needed for its evaluation.</p><p>Aims of this study are to analyze and to compare the prediction ability of models using different types of multitemporal bare soil composites derived from Sentinel-2 images and their applicability for mapping soil properties in large areas. The study was conducted on a regional scale in the soil heterogeneous region of central Czechia with dissected relief and variable soil properties, where data from 100 soil profiles with soil analytics were available. Sentinel-2 images from 2016-2019 were used for composite formation in the python numpy environment. Different methods of cloud masking, bare soil identification and data aggregation (both already used in previous studies and newly derived) have been tested to compare which is the most suitable for prediction of soil properties. The principles of digital soil mapping and machine learning algorithms (random forest and support vector machine multivariate methods) were used for prediction.</p><p>Results reveal that Sentinel-2 multitemporal bare soil composites can be successfully applied in the prediction of soil properties. The setting of basic parameters of composite creation is very complex and challenging and it requires to use exact algorithms for masking clouds and bare soil. Soil moisture and surface roughness also greatly affect spectral characteristics of bare soil and thus a very important aspect of compositing is finding appropriate statistics to derive final pixel values of reflectance (minimum, mean, median, ...). One possible way to minimize the effect of moisture and surface roughness may be incorporation radar backscatter information from Sentinel-1. However, it further complicates the processing of data and makes the composite creation more complex.</p><p>The research has been supported by the project no. QK1820389 " Production of actual detailed maps of soil properties in the Czech Republic based on database of Large-scale Mapping of Agricultural Soils in Czechoslovakia and application of digital soil mapping" funding by Ministry of Agriculture.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luka Rumora ◽  
Mario Miler ◽  
Damir Medak

Atmospheric correction is one of the key parts of remote sensing preprocessing because it can influence and change the final classification result. This research examines the impact of five different atmospheric correction processing on land cover classification accuracy using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. Those are surface reflectance (SREF), standardized surface reflectance (STDSREF), Sentinel-2 atmospheric correction (S2AC), image correction for atmospheric effects (iCOR), dark object subtraction (DOS) and top of the atmosphere (TOA) reflectance without any atmospheric correction. Sentinel-2 images corrected with stated atmospheric corrections were classified using four different machine learning classification techniques namely extreme gradient boosting (XGB), random forests (RF), support vector machine (SVM) and catboost (CB). For classification, five different classes were used: bare land, low vegetation, high vegetation, water and built-up area. SVM classification provided the best overall result for twelve dates, for all atmospheric corrections. It was the best method for both cases: when using Sentinel-2 bands and radiometric indices and when using just spectral bands. The best atmospheric correction for classification with SVM using radiometric indices is S2AC with the median value of 96.54% and the best correction without radiometric indices is STDSREF with the median value of 96.83%.


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 4019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yunbin Kim ◽  
Jaewon Sa ◽  
Yongwha Chung ◽  
Daihee Park ◽  
Sungju Lee

The use of IoT (Internet of Things) technology for the management of pet dogs left alone at home is increasing. This includes tasks such as automatic feeding, operation of play equipment, and location detection. Classification of the vocalizations of pet dogs using information from a sound sensor is an important method to analyze the behavior or emotions of dogs that are left alone. These sounds should be acquired by attaching the IoT sound sensor to the dog, and then classifying the sound events (e.g., barking, growling, howling, and whining). However, sound sensors tend to transmit large amounts of data and consume considerable amounts of power, which presents issues in the case of resource-constrained IoT sensor devices. In this paper, we propose a way to classify pet dog sound events and improve resource efficiency without significant degradation of accuracy. To achieve this, we only acquire the intensity data of sounds by using a relatively resource-efficient noise sensor. This presents issues as well, since it is difficult to achieve sufficient classification accuracy using only intensity data due to the loss of information from the sound events. To address this problem and avoid significant degradation of classification accuracy, we apply long short-term memory-fully convolutional network (LSTM-FCN), which is a deep learning method, to analyze time-series data, and exploit bicubic interpolation. Based on experimental results, the proposed method based on noise sensors (i.e., Shapelet and LSTM-FCN for time-series) was found to improve energy efficiency by 10 times without significant degradation of accuracy compared to typical methods based on sound sensors (i.e., mel-frequency cepstrum coefficient (MFCC), spectrogram, and mel-spectrum for feature extraction, and support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbor (K-NN) for classification).


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 586
Author(s):  
Salvatore Praticò ◽  
Francesco Solano ◽  
Salvatore Di Fazio ◽  
Giuseppe Modica

The sustainable management of natural heritage is presently considered a global strategic issue. Owing to the ever-growing availability of free data and software, remote sensing (RS) techniques have been primarily used to map, analyse, and monitor natural resources for conservation purposes. The need to adopt multi-scale and multi-temporal approaches to detect different phenological aspects of different vegetation types and species has also emerged. The time-series composite image approach allows for capturing much of the spectral variability, but presents some criticalities (e.g., time-consuming research, downloading data, and the required storage space). To overcome these issues, the Google Earth engine (GEE) has been proposed, a free cloud-based computational platform that allows users to access and process remotely sensed data at petabyte scales. The application was tested in a natural protected area in Calabria (South Italy), which is particularly representative of the Mediterranean mountain forest environment. In the research, random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and classification and regression tree (CART) algorithms were used to perform supervised pixel-based classification based on the use of Sentinel-2 images. A process to select the best input image (seasonal composition strategies, statistical operators, band composition, and derived vegetation indices (VIs) information) for classification was implemented. A set of accuracy indicators, including overall accuracy (OA) and multi-class F-score (Fm), were computed to assess the results of the different classifications. GEE proved to be a reliable and powerful tool for the classification process. The best results (OA = 0.88 and Fm = 0.88) were achieved using RF with the summer image composite, adding three VIs (NDVI, EVI, and NBR) to the Sentinel-2 bands. SVM and RF produced OAs of 0.83 and 0.80, respectively.


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