scholarly journals Mapping the Growing Stem Volume of the Coniferous Plantations in North China Using Multispectral Data from Integrated GF-2 and Sentinel-2 Images and an Optimized Feature Variable Selection Method

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 2740
Author(s):  
Xinyu Li ◽  
Hui Lin ◽  
Jiangping Long ◽  
Xiaodong Xu

Accurate measurement of forest growing stem volume (GSV) is important for forest resource management and ecosystem dynamics monitoring. Optical remote sensing imagery has great application prospects in forest GSV estimation on regional and global scales as it is easily accessible, has a wide coverage, and mature technology. However, their application is limited by cloud coverage, data stripes, atmospheric effects, and satellite sensor errors. Combining multi-sensor data can reduce such limitations as it increases the data availability, but also causes the multi-dimensional problem that increases the difficulty of feature selection. In this study, GaoFen-2 (GF-2) and Sentinel-2 images were integrated, and feature variables and data scenarios were derived by a proposed adaptive feature variable combination optimization (AFCO) program for estimating the GSV of coniferous plantations. The AFCO algorithm was compared to four traditional feature variable selection methods, namely, random forest (RF), stepwise random forest (SRF), fast iterative feature selection method for k-nearest neighbors (KNN-FIFS), and the feature variable screening and combination optimization procedure based on the distance correlation coefficient and k-nearest neighbors (DC-FSCK). The comparison indicated that the AFCO program not only considered the combination effect of feature variables, but also optimized the selection of the first feature variable, error threshold, and selection of the estimation model. Furthermore, we selected feature variables from three datasets (GF-2, Sentinel-2, and the integrated data) following the AFCO and four other feature selection methods and used the k-nearest neighbors (KNN) and random forest regression (RFR) to estimate the GSV of coniferous plantations in northern China. The results indicated that the integrated data improved the GSV estimation accuracy of coniferous plantations, with relative root mean square errors (RMSErs) of 15.0% and 19.6%, which were lower than those of GF-2 and Sentinel-2 data, respectively. In particular, the texture feature variables derived from GF-2 red band image have a significant impact on GSV estimation performance of the integrated dataset. For most data scenarios, the AFCO algorithm gained more accurate GSV estimates, as the RMSErs were 30.0%, 23.7%, 17.7%, and 17.5% lower than those of RF, SRF, KNN-FIFS, and DC-FSCK, respectively. The GSV distribution map obtained by the AFCO method and RFR model matched the field observations well. This study provides some insight into the application of optical images, optimization of the feature variable combination, and modeling algorithm selection for estimating the GSV of coniferous plantations.

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (24) ◽  
pp. 7248
Author(s):  
Fugen Jiang ◽  
Mykola Kutia ◽  
Arbi J. Sarkissian ◽  
Hui Lin ◽  
Jiangping Long ◽  
...  

Forest growing stem volume (GSV) reflects the richness of forest resources as well as the quality of forest ecosystems. Remote sensing technology enables robust and efficient GSV estimation as it greatly reduces the survey time and cost while facilitating periodic monitoring. Given its red edge bands and a short revisit time period, Sentinel-2 images were selected for the GSV estimation in Wangyedian forest farm, Inner Mongolia, China. The variable combination was shown to significantly affect the accuracy of the estimation model. After extracting spectral variables, texture features, and topographic factors, a stepwise random forest (SRF) method was proposed to select variable combinations and establish random forest regressions (RFR) for GSV estimation. The linear stepwise regression (LSR), Boruta, Variable Selection Using Random Forests (VSURF), and random forest (RF) methods were then used as references for comparison with the proposed SRF for selection of predictors and GSV estimation. Combined with the observed GSV data and the Sentinel-2 images, the distributions of GSV were generated by the RFR models with the variable combinations determined by the LSR, RF, Boruta, VSURF, and SRF. The results show that the texture features of Sentinel-2’s red edge bands can significantly improve the accuracy of GSV estimation. The SRF method can effectively select the optimal variable combination, and the SRF-based model results in the highest estimation accuracy with the decreases of relative root mean square error by 16.4%, 14.4%, 16.3%, and 10.6% compared with those from the LSR-, RF-, Boruta-, and VSURF-based models, respectively. The GSV distribution generated by the SRF-based model matched that of the field observations well. The results of this study are expected to provide a reference for GSV estimation of coniferous plantations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Afonso ◽  
André Neves ◽  
Carlos Viegas Damásio ◽  
João Moura Pires ◽  
Fernando Birra ◽  
...  

Every year, wildfires strike the Portuguese territory and are a concern for public entities and the population. To prevent a wildfire progression and minimize its impact, Fuel Management Zones (FMZs) have been stipulated, by law, around buildings, settlements, along national roads, and other infrastructures. FMZs require monitoring of the vegetation condition to promptly proceed with the maintenance and cleaning of these zones. To improve FMZ monitoring, this paper proposes the use of satellite images, such as the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, along with vegetation indices and extracted temporal characteristics (max, min, mean and standard deviation) associated with the vegetation within and outside the FMZs and to determine if they were treated. These characteristics feed machine-learning algorithms, such as XGBoost, Support Vector Machines, K-nearest neighbors and Random Forest. The results show that it is possible to detect an intervention in an FMZ with high accuracy, namely with an F1-score ranging from 90% up to 94% and a Kappa ranging from 0.80 up to 0.89.


IEEE Access ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 139512-139528
Author(s):  
Shuangjie Li ◽  
Kaixiang Zhang ◽  
Qianru Chen ◽  
Shuqin Wang ◽  
Shaoqiang Zhang

Author(s):  
*Fadare Oluwaseun Gbenga ◽  
Adetunmbi Adebayo Olusola ◽  
(Mrs) Oyinloye Oghenerukevwe Eloho ◽  
Mogaji Stephen Alaba

The multiplication of malware variations is probably the greatest problem in PC security and the protection of information in form of source code against unauthorized access is a central issue in computer security. In recent times, machine learning has been extensively researched for malware detection and ensemble technique has been established to be highly effective in terms of detection accuracy. This paper proposes a framework that combines combining the exploit of both Chi-square as the feature selection method and eight ensemble learning classifiers on five base learners- K-Nearest Neighbors, Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Decision Trees, and Logistic Regression. K-Nearest Neighbors returns the highest accuracy of 95.37%, 87.89% on chi-square, and without feature selection respectively. Extreme Gradient Boosting Classifier ensemble accuracy is the highest with 97.407%, 91.72% with Chi-square as feature selection, and ensemble methods without feature selection respectively. Extreme Gradient Boosting Classifier and Random Forest are leading in the seven evaluative measures of chi-square as a feature selection method and ensemble methods without feature selection respectively. The study results show that the tree-based ensemble model is compelling for malware classification.


PeerJ ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. e8764 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siroj Bakoev ◽  
Lyubov Getmantseva ◽  
Maria Kolosova ◽  
Olga Kostyunina ◽  
Duane R. Chartier ◽  
...  

Industrial pig farming is associated with negative technological pressure on the bodies of pigs. Leg weakness and lameness are the sources of significant economic loss in raising pigs. Therefore, it is important to identify the predictors of limb condition. This work presents assessments of the state of limbs using indicators of growth and meat characteristics of pigs based on machine learning algorithms. We have evaluated and compared the accuracy of prediction for nine ML classification algorithms (Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors, Artificial Neural Networks, C50Tree, Support Vector Machines, Naive Bayes, Generalized Linear Models, Boost, and Linear Discriminant Analysis) and have identified the Random Forest and K-Nearest Neighbors as the best-performing algorithms for predicting pig leg weakness using a small set of simple measurements that can be taken at an early stage of animal development. Measurements of Muscle Thickness, Back Fat amount, and Average Daily Gain were found to be significant predictors of the conformation of pig limbs. Our work demonstrates the utility and relative ease of using machine learning algorithms to assess the state of limbs in pigs based on growth rate and meat characteristics.


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