scholarly journals Integrating Sentinel-1/2 Data and Machine Learning to Map Cotton Fields in Northern Xinjiang, China

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (23) ◽  
pp. 4819
Author(s):  
Tao Hu ◽  
Yina Hu ◽  
Jianquan Dong ◽  
Sijing Qiu ◽  
Jian Peng

Timely and accurate information of cotton planting areas is essential for monitoring and managing cotton fields. However, there is no large-scale and high-resolution method suitable for mapping cotton fields, and the problems associated with low resolution and poor timeliness need to be solved. Here, we proposed a new framework for mapping cotton fields based on Sentinel-1/2 data for different phenological periods, random forest classifiers, and the multi-scale image segmentation method. A cotton field map for 2019 at a spatial resolution of 10 m was generated for northern Xinjiang, a dominant cotton planting region in China. The overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of the map were 0.932 and 0.813, respectively. The results showed that the boll opening stage was the best phenological phase for mapping cotton fields and the cotton fields was identified most accurately at the early boll opening stage, about 40 days before harvest. Additionally, Sentinel-1 and the red edge bands in Sentinel-2 are important for cotton field mapping, and there is great potential for the fusion of optical images and microwave images in crop mapping. This study provides an effective approach for high-resolution and high-accuracy cotton field mapping, which is vital for sustainable monitoring and management of cotton planting.

Author(s):  
Zhao Sun ◽  
Yifu Wang ◽  
Lei Pan ◽  
Yunhong Xie ◽  
Bo Zhang ◽  
...  

AbstractPine wilt disease (PWD) is currently one of the main causes of large-scale forest destruction. To control the spread of PWD, it is essential to detect affected pine trees quickly. This study investigated the feasibility of using the object-oriented multi-scale segmentation algorithm to identify trees discolored by PWD. We used an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform equipped with an RGB digital camera to obtain high spatial resolution images, and multi-scale segmentation was applied to delineate the tree crown, coupling the use of object-oriented classification to classify trees discolored by PWD. Then, the optimal segmentation scale was implemented using the estimation of scale parameter (ESP2) plug-in. The feature space of the segmentation results was optimized, and appropriate features were selected for classification. The results showed that the optimal scale, shape, and compactness values of the tree crown segmentation algorithm were 56, 0.5, and 0.8, respectively. The producer’s accuracy (PA), user’s accuracy (UA), and F1 score were 0.722, 0.605, and 0.658, respectively. There were no significant classification errors in the final classification results, and the low accuracy was attributed to the low number of objects count caused by incorrect segmentation. The multi-scale segmentation and object-oriented classification method could accurately identify trees discolored by PWD with a straightforward and rapid processing. This study provides a technical method for monitoring the occurrence of PWD and identifying the discolored trees of disease using UAV-based high-resolution images.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Vionnet ◽  
Christopher B. Marsh ◽  
Brian Menounos ◽  
Simon Gascoin ◽  
Nicholas E. Wayand ◽  
...  

Abstract. The interaction of mountain terrain with meteorological processes causes substantial temporal and spatial variability in snow accumulation and ablation. Processes impacted by complex terrain include large-scale orographic enhancement of snowfall, small-scale processes such as gravitational and wind-induced transport of snow, and variability in the radiative balance such as through terrain shadowing. In this study, a multi-scale modeling approach is proposed to simulate the temporal and spatial evolution of high mountain snowpacks using the Canadian Hydrological Model (CHM), a multi-scale, spatially distributed modelling framework. CHM permits a variable spatial resolution by using the efficient terrain representation by unstructured triangular meshes. The model simulates processes such as radiation shadowing and irradiance to slopes, blowing snow redistribution and sublimation, avalanching, forest canopy interception and sublimation and snowpack melt. Short-term, km-scale atmospheric forecasts from Environment and Climate Change Canada's Global Environmental Multiscale Model through its High Resolution Deterministic Prediction System (HRDPS) drive CHM, and were downscaled to the unstructured mesh scale using process-based procedures. In particular, a new wind downscaling strategy combines meso-scale HRDPS outputs and micro-scale pre-computed wind fields to allow for blowing snow calculations. HRDPS-CHM was applied to simulate snow conditions down to 50-m resolution during winter 2017/2018 in a domain around the Kananaskis Valley (~1000 km2) in the Canadian Rockies. Simulations were evaluated using high-resolution airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) snow depth data and snow persistence indexes derived from remotely sensed imagery. Results included model falsifications and showed that both blowing snow and gravitational snow redistribution need to be simulated to capture the snowpack variability and the evolution of snow depth and persistence with elevation across the region. Accumulation of wind-blown snow on leeward slopes and associated snow-cover persistence were underestimated in a CHM simulation driven by wind fields that did not capture leeside flow recirculation and associated wind speed decreases. A terrain-based metric helped to identify these lee-side areas and improved the wind field and the associated snow redistribution. An overestimation of snow redistribution from windward to leeward slopes and subsequent avalanching was still found. The results of this study highlight the need for further improvements of snowdrift-permitting models for large-scale applications, in particular the representation of subgrid topographic effects on snow transport.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (21) ◽  
pp. 4220
Author(s):  
Yu Tao ◽  
Jan-Peter Muller ◽  
Siting Xiong ◽  
Susan J. Conway

The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides remotely sensed imagery at the highest spatial resolution at 25–50 cm/pixel of the surface of Mars. However, due to the spatial resolution being so high, the total area covered by HiRISE targeted stereo acquisitions is very limited. This results in a lack of the availability of high-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) which are better than 1 m/pixel. Such high-resolution DTMs have always been considered desirable for the international community of planetary scientists to carry out fine-scale geological analysis of the Martian surface. Recently, new deep learning-based techniques that are able to retrieve DTMs from single optical orbital imagery have been developed and applied to single HiRISE observational data. In this paper, we improve upon a previously developed single-image DTM estimation system called MADNet (1.0). We propose optimisations which we collectively call MADNet 2.0, which is based on a supervised image-to-height estimation network, multi-scale DTM reconstruction, and 3D co-alignment processes. In particular, we employ optimised single-scale inference and multi-scale reconstruction (in MADNet 2.0), instead of multi-scale inference and single-scale reconstruction (in MADNet 1.0), to produce more accurate large-scale topographic retrieval with boosted fine-scale resolution. We demonstrate the improvements of the MADNet 2.0 DTMs produced using HiRISE images, in comparison to the MADNet 1.0 DTMs and the published Planetary Data System (PDS) DTMs over the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover’s landing site at Oxia Planum. Qualitative and quantitative assessments suggest the proposed MADNet 2.0 system is capable of producing pixel-scale DTM retrieval at the same spatial resolution (25 cm/pixel) of the input HiRISE images.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 755 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaodong Zhang ◽  
Kun Zhu ◽  
Guanzhou Chen ◽  
Xiaoliang Tan ◽  
Lifei Zhang ◽  
...  

Object detection on very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery has attracted a lot of attention in the field of image automatic interpretation. Region-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been vastly promoted in this domain, which first generate candidate regions and then accurately classify and locate the objects existing in these regions. However, the overlarge images, the complex image backgrounds and the uneven size and quantity distribution of training samples make the detection tasks more challenging, especially for small and dense objects. To solve these problems, an effective region-based VHR remote sensing imagery object detection framework named Double Multi-scale Feature Pyramid Network (DM-FPN) was proposed in this paper, which utilizes inherent multi-scale pyramidal features and combines the strong-semantic, low-resolution features and the weak-semantic, high-resolution features simultaneously. DM-FPN consists of a multi-scale region proposal network and a multi-scale object detection network, these two modules share convolutional layers and can be trained end-to-end. We proposed several multi-scale training strategies to increase the diversity of training data and overcome the size restrictions of the input images. We also proposed multi-scale inference and adaptive categorical non-maximum suppression (ACNMS) strategies to promote detection performance, especially for small and dense objects. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluations on large-scale DOTA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, which achieves mean average precision (mAP) value of 0.7927 on validation dataset and the best mAP value of 0.793 on testing dataset.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 692
Author(s):  
Yuwei Jin ◽  
Wenbo Xu ◽  
Ce Zhang ◽  
Xin Luo ◽  
Haitao Jia

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), such as U-Net, have shown competitive performance in the automatic extraction of buildings from Very High-Resolution (VHR) aerial images. However, due to the unstable multi-scale context aggregation, the insufficient combination of multi-level features and the lack of consideration of the semantic boundary, most existing CNNs produce incomplete segmentation for large-scale buildings and result in predictions with huge uncertainty at building boundaries. This paper presents a novel network with a special boundary-aware loss embedded, called the Boundary-Aware Refined Network (BARNet), to address the gap above. The unique properties of the proposed BARNet are the gated-attention refined fusion unit, the denser atrous spatial pyramid pooling module, and the boundary-aware loss. The performance of the BARNet is tested on two popular data sets that include various urban scenes and diverse patterns of buildings. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches in both visual interpretation and quantitative evaluations.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 259
Author(s):  
Guohan Zhao ◽  
Thomas Balstrøm ◽  
Ole Mark ◽  
Marina B. Jensen

The accuracy of two-dimensional hydrodynamic models (2D models) is improved when high-resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are used. However, the entailed high spatial discretisation results in excessive computational expenses, thus prohibiting their implementation in real-time forecasting especially at a large scale. This paper presents a sub-model approach that adapts 1D static models to tailor high-resolution 2D model grids relevant to specified targets, such that the tailor-made 2D hydrodynamic sub-models yield fast processing without significant loss of accuracy via a GIS-based multi-scale simulation framework. To validate the proposed approach, model experiments were first designed to separately test the impact of two outcomes (i.e., the reduced computational domains and the optimised boundary conditions) towards final 2D prediction results. Then, the robustness of the sub-model approach was evaluated by selecting four focus areas with distinct catchment terrain morphologies as well as distinct rainfall return periods of 1–100 years. The sub-model approach resulted in a 45–553 times faster processing with a 99% reduction in the number of computational cells for all four cases; the goodness of fit regarding predicted flood extents was above 0.88 of F2, flood depths yield Root Mean Square Errors (RMSE) below 1.5 cm and the discrepancies of u- and v-directional velocities at selected points were less than 0.015 ms−1. As such, this approach reduces the 2D models’ computing expenses significantly, thus paving the way for large-scale high-resolution 2D real-time forecasting.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (19) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Adami ◽  
Francesco Fassi ◽  
Luigi Fregonese ◽  
Mario Piana

<p>This article aims to critically examine the entire methodology of very large scale (1:1) surveying and documentation of mosaic surfaces. The term ‘survey’ should be read in its broadest and most complete and sense, including the phases of measurement and data processing as well as management and use of these data for the purposes of preservation and maintenance. The case study presented here took place at St Mark’s Basilica (<em>Basilica di San Marco</em>), in Venice, where mosaic flooring, wall and vault decorations have been surveyed on two separate occasions. These two experiences shared a common goal (a full-scale survey of the mosaic decorations) but differed in terms of the methodologies used, chiefly due to the technological developments of recent years. All this, therefore, lends itself to a methodological reflection and critique of the ways in which surveying technology has evolved over time. It enables to conduct surveys that would, just a few years ago, have been inconceivable due to their size and complexity. This article describes in detail current surveying processes, which includes the use of a multi-scale “image-based” approach, “re-topology” methods such as non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) and a tailor-made Building Information Modeling (BIM) system. This system allows the direct use of a three-dimensional (3D) model of the Basilica within the maintenance process of the monument itself with the options to georeferencing information, extract basic metric data and catalogue all its mosaics.</p><p><strong>Highlights:</strong></p><ul><li><p>Modern digital photogrammetric techniques enable the acquisition of very complex objects, not only in terms of form but also in terms of material.</p></li><li><p>To obtain high resolution orthophotos, it is necessary to accurately take care of all the stages of the process: photographic acquisition, surveying, modelling and orthographic reprojection.</p></li><li><p>High resolution images and detailed 3D models can benefit from a complex BIM system for the management of all data.</p></li></ul>


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 743-769
Author(s):  
Vincent Vionnet ◽  
Christopher B. Marsh ◽  
Brian Menounos ◽  
Simon Gascoin ◽  
Nicholas E. Wayand ◽  
...  

Abstract. The interaction of mountain terrain with meteorological processes causes substantial temporal and spatial variability in snow accumulation and ablation. Processes impacted by complex terrain include large-scale orographic enhancement of snowfall, small-scale processes such as gravitational and wind-induced transport of snow, and variability in the radiative balance such as through terrain shadowing. In this study, a multi-scale modelling approach is proposed to simulate the temporal and spatial evolution of high-mountain snowpacks. The multi-scale approach combines atmospheric data from a numerical weather prediction system at the kilometre scale with process-based downscaling techniques to drive the Canadian Hydrological Model (CHM) at spatial resolutions allowing for explicit snow redistribution modelling. CHM permits a variable spatial resolution by using the efficient terrain representation by unstructured triangular meshes. The model simulates processes such as radiation shadowing and irradiance to slopes, blowing-snow transport (saltation and suspension) and sublimation, avalanching, forest canopy interception and sublimation, and snowpack melt. Short-term, kilometre-scale atmospheric forecasts from Environment and Climate Change Canada's Global Environmental Multiscale Model through its High Resolution Deterministic Prediction System (HRDPS) drive CHM and are downscaled to the unstructured mesh scale. In particular, a new wind-downscaling strategy uses pre-computed wind fields from a mass-conserving wind model at 50 m resolution to perturb the mesoscale HRDPS wind and to account for the influence of topographic features on wind direction and speed. HRDPS-CHM was applied to simulate snow conditions down to 50 m resolution during winter 2017/2018 in a domain around the Kananaskis Valley (∼1000 km2) in the Canadian Rockies. Simulations were evaluated using high-resolution airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) snow depth data and snow persistence indexes derived from remotely sensed imagery. Results included model falsifications and showed that both wind-induced and gravitational snow redistribution need to be simulated to capture the snowpack variability and the evolution of snow depth and persistence with elevation across the region. Accumulation of windblown snow on leeward slopes and associated snow cover persistence were underestimated in a CHM simulation driven by wind fields that did not capture lee-side flow recirculation and associated wind speed decreases. A terrain-based metric helped to identify these lee-side areas and improved the wind field and the associated snow redistribution. An overestimation of snow redistribution from windward to leeward slopes and subsequent avalanching was still found. The results of this study highlight the need for further improvements of snowdrift-permitting models for large-scale applications, in particular the representation of subgrid topographic effects on snow transport.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. Fonseca ◽  
J. A. Santos

AbstractClimate research in Portugal is often constrained by the lack of homogeneous, temporally and spatially consistent, and long-term climatic series. To overcome this limitation, the authors developed new high-resolution gridded datasets (~1 km) of daily mean, minimum, and maximum air temperatures over Portugal (1950–2015, 66 yr), based on gridded daily temperatures (E-OBS) at ~25-km spatial resolution. A two-step approach was followed, under the assumption that daily temperature variability in Portugal is mainly controlled by atmospheric large-scale forcing, while local processes are mostly expressed as strong spatial gradients. First, monthly baseline (1971–2000) patterns were estimated at 1-km grid resolution by applying multivariate linear regressions (exploratory variables: elevation, latitude, and distance to coastline). A kriging of residuals from baseline normals of 36 weather stations was applied for bias corrections. Second, bilinearly interpolated daily temperature anomalies were then added to the daily baseline patterns to obtain the final datasets. The method performance was evaluated using fivefold cross-validations. The datasets were also validated using daily temperatures from 23 stations not incorporated in E-OBS. A climatological analysis based on these datasets was carried out, highlighting spatial heterogeneities, seasonality, long-term trends, interannual variability, and extremes. The spatial and temporal variability is generally coherent with previous studies at coarser resolutions. An overall warming trend is apparent for all variables and indices, but showing different strengths and spatial variability. These datasets show important advantages over preexisting data, including more detailed and accurate information on trends and interannual variability of precipitation extremes, and can thus be applied to several areas of research in Portugal, such as hydrology, ecology, agriculture, and forestry.


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