scholarly journals Estimating Forest Aboveground Biomass Using Gaofen-1 Images, Sentinel-1 Images, and Machine Learning Algorithms: A Case Study of the Dabie Mountain Region, China

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 176
Author(s):  
Haoshuang Han ◽  
Rongrong Wan ◽  
Bing Li

Quantitatively mapping forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is of great significance for the study of terrestrial carbon storage and global carbon cycles, and remote sensing-based data are a valuable source of estimating forest AGB. In this study, we evaluated the potential of machine learning algorithms (MLAs) by integrating Gaofen-1 (GF1) images, Sentinel-1 (S1) images, and topographic data for AGB estimation in the Dabie Mountain region, China. Variables extracted from GF1 and S1 images and digital elevation model data from sample plots were used to explain the field AGB value variations. The prediction capability of stepwise multiple regression and three MLAs, i.e., support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and backpropagation neural network were compared. The results showed that the RF model achieved the highest prediction accuracy (R2 = 0.70, RMSE = 16.26 t/ha), followed by the SVM model (R2 = 0.66, RMSE = 18.03 t/ha) for the testing datasets. Some variables extracted from the GF1 images (e.g., normalized differential vegetation index, band 1-blue, the mean texture feature of band 3-red with windows of 3 × 3), S1 images (e.g., vertical transmit-horizontal receive and vertical transmit-vertical receive backscatter coefficient), and altitude had strong correlations with field AGB values (p < 0.01). Among the explanatory variables in MLAs, variables extracted from GF1 made a greater contribution to estimating forest AGB than those derived from S1 images. These results indicate the potential of the RF model for evaluating forest AGB by combining GF1 and S1, and that it could provide a reference for biomass estimation using multi-source images.

Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 1073 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li ◽  
Li ◽  
Li ◽  
Liu

Forest biomass is a major store of carbon and plays a crucial role in the regional and global carbon cycle. Accurate forest biomass assessment is important for monitoring and mapping the status of and changes in forests. However, while remote sensing-based forest biomass estimation in general is well developed and extensively used, improving the accuracy of biomass estimation remains challenging. In this paper, we used China’s National Forest Continuous Inventory data and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager data in combination with three algorithms, either the linear regression (LR), random forest (RF), or extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), to establish biomass estimation models based on forest type. In the modeling process, two methods of variable selection, e.g., stepwise regression and variable importance-base method, were used to select optimal variable subsets for LR and machine learning algorithms (e.g., RF and XGBoost), respectively. Comfortingly, the accuracy of models was significantly improved, and thus the following conclusions were drawn: (1) Variable selection is very important for improving the performance of models, especially for machine learning algorithms, and the influence of variable selection on XGBoost is significantly greater than that of RF. (2) Machine learning algorithms have advantages in aboveground biomass (AGB) estimation, and the XGBoost and RF models significantly improved the estimation accuracy compared with the LR models. Despite that the problems of overestimation and underestimation were not fully eliminated, the XGBoost algorithm worked well and reduced these problems to a certain extent. (3) The approach of AGB modeling based on forest type is a very advantageous method for improving the performance at the lower and higher values of AGB. Some conclusions in this paper were probably different as the study area changed. The methods used in this paper provide an optional and useful approach for improving the accuracy of AGB estimation based on remote sensing data, and the estimation of AGB was a reference basis for monitoring the forest ecosystem of the study area.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (17) ◽  
pp. 5974
Author(s):  
Chunyu Du ◽  
Wenyi Fan ◽  
Ye Ma ◽  
Hung-Il Jin ◽  
Zhen Zhen

Although the combination of Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data and optical imagery and machine learning algorithms were proved to improve the estimation of aboveground biomass (AGB), the synergistic approaches of different data and ensemble learning algorithms have not been fully investigated, especially for natural secondary forests (NSFs) with complex structures. This study aimed to explore the effects of the two factors on AGB estimation of NSFs based on ALS data and Landsat 8 imagery. The synergistic method of extracting novel features (i.e., COLI1 and COLI2) using optimal Landsat 8 features and the best-performing ALS feature (i.e., elevation mean) yielded higher accuracy of AGB estimation than either optical-only or ALS-only features. However, both of them failed to improve the accuracy compared to the simple combination of the untransformed features that generated them. The convolutional neural networks (CNN) model was much superior to other classic machine learning algorithms no matter of features. The stacked generalization (SG) algorithms, a kind of ensemble learning algorithms, greatly improved the accuracies compared to the corresponding base model, and the SG with the CNN meta-model performed best. This study provides technical support for a wall-to-wall AGB mapping of NSFs of northeastern China using efficient features and algorithms.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4324
Author(s):  
Moaed A. Abd ◽  
Rudy Paul ◽  
Aparna Aravelli ◽  
Ou Bai ◽  
Leonel Lagos ◽  
...  

Multifunctional flexible tactile sensors could be useful to improve the control of prosthetic hands. To that end, highly stretchable liquid metal tactile sensors (LMS) were designed, manufactured via photolithography, and incorporated into the fingertips of a prosthetic hand. Three novel contributions were made with the LMS. First, individual fingertips were used to distinguish between different speeds of sliding contact with different surfaces. Second, differences in surface textures were reliably detected during sliding contact. Third, the capacity for hierarchical tactile sensor integration was demonstrated by using four LMS signals simultaneously to distinguish between ten complex multi-textured surfaces. Four different machine learning algorithms were compared for their successful classification capabilities: K-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and neural network (NN). The time-frequency features of the LMSs were extracted to train and test the machine learning algorithms. The NN generally performed the best at the speed and texture detection with a single finger and had a 99.2 ± 0.8% accuracy to distinguish between ten different multi-textured surfaces using four LMSs from four fingers simultaneously. The capability for hierarchical multi-finger tactile sensation integration could be useful to provide a higher level of intelligence for artificial hands.


Author(s):  
Pratyush Kaware

In this paper a cost-effective sensor has been implemented to read finger bend signals, by attaching the sensor to a finger, so as to classify them based on the degree of bent as well as the joint about which the finger was being bent. This was done by testing with various machine learning algorithms to get the most accurate and consistent classifier. Finally, we found that Support Vector Machine was the best algorithm suited to classify our data, using we were able predict live state of a finger, i.e., the degree of bent and the joints involved. The live voltage values from the sensor were transmitted using a NodeMCU micro-controller which were converted to digital and uploaded on a database for analysis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2.8) ◽  
pp. 684 ◽  
Author(s):  
V V. Ramalingam ◽  
Ayantan Dandapath ◽  
M Karthik Raja

Heart related diseases or Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs) are the main reason for a huge number of death in the world over the last few decades and has emerged as the most life-threatening disease, not only in India but in the whole world. So, there is a need of reliable, accurate and feasible system to diagnose such diseases in time for proper treatment. Machine Learning algorithms and techniques have been applied to various medical datasets to automate the analysis of large and complex data. Many researchers, in recent times, have been using several machine learning techniques to help the health care industry and the professionals in the diagnosis of heart related diseases. This paper presents a survey of various models based on such algorithms and techniques andanalyze their performance. Models based on supervised learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), NaïveBayes, Decision Trees (DT), Random Forest (RF) and ensemble models are found very popular among the researchers.


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 3532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Mansbridge ◽  
Jurgen Mitsch ◽  
Nicola Bollard ◽  
Keith Ellis ◽  
Giuliana Miguel-Pacheco ◽  
...  

Grazing and ruminating are the most important behaviours for ruminants, as they spend most of their daily time budget performing these. Continuous surveillance of eating behaviour is an important means for monitoring ruminant health, productivity and welfare. However, surveillance performed by human operators is prone to human variance, time-consuming and costly, especially on animals kept at pasture or free-ranging. The use of sensors to automatically acquire data, and software to classify and identify behaviours, offers significant potential in addressing such issues. In this work, data collected from sheep by means of an accelerometer/gyroscope sensor attached to the ear and collar, sampled at 16 Hz, were used to develop classifiers for grazing and ruminating behaviour using various machine learning algorithms: random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), k nearest neighbour (kNN) and adaptive boosting (Adaboost). Multiple features extracted from the signals were ranked on their importance for classification. Several performance indicators were considered when comparing classifiers as a function of algorithm used, sensor localisation and number of used features. Random forest yielded the highest overall accuracies: 92% for collar and 91% for ear. Gyroscope-based features were shown to have the greatest relative importance for eating behaviours. The optimum number of feature characteristics to be incorporated into the model was 39, from both ear and collar data. The findings suggest that one can successfully classify eating behaviours in sheep with very high accuracy; this could be used to develop a device for automatic monitoring of feed intake in the sheep sector to monitor health and welfare.


Author(s):  
Sandy C. Lauguico ◽  
◽  
Ronnie S. Concepcion II ◽  
Jonnel D. Alejandrino ◽  
Rogelio Ruzcko Tobias ◽  
...  

The arising problem on food scarcity drives the innovation of urban farming. One of the methods in urban farming is the smart aquaponics. However, for a smart aquaponics to yield crops successfully, it needs intensive monitoring, control, and automation. An efficient way of implementing this is the utilization of vision systems and machine learning algorithms to optimize the capabilities of the farming technique. To realize this, a comparative analysis of three machine learning estimators: Logistic Regression (LR), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Linear Support Vector Machine (L-SVM) was conducted. This was done by modeling each algorithm from the machine vision-feature extracted images of lettuce which were raised in a smart aquaponics setup. Each of the model was optimized to increase cross and hold-out validations. The results showed that KNN having the tuned hyperparameters of n_neighbors=24, weights='distance', algorithm='auto', leaf_size = 10 was the most effective model for the given dataset, yielding a cross-validation mean accuracy of 87.06% and a classification accuracy of 91.67%.


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