Using Combination Technique for Land Cover Classification of Optical Multispectral Images

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-39
Author(s):  
Keerti Kulkarni ◽  
Vijaya P. A.

The need for efficient planning of the land is exponentially increasing because of the unplanned human activities, especially in the urban areas. A land cover map gives a detailed report on temporal dynamics of a given geographical area. The land cover map can be obtained by using machine learning classifiers on the raw satellite images. In this work, the authors propose a combination method for the land cover classification. This method combines the outputs of two classifiers, namely, random forests (RF) and support vector machines (SVM), using Dempster-Shafer combination theory (DSCT), also called the theory of evidence. This combination is possible because of the inherent uncertainties associated with the output of each classifier. The experimental results indicate an improved accuracy (89.6%, kappa = 0.86 as versus accuracy of RF [87.31%, kappa = 0.83] and SVM [82.144%, kappa = 0.76]). The results are validated using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and the overall accuracy (OA) has been used as a comparison basis.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bessardon ◽  
Emily Gleeson ◽  
Eoin Walsh

<p>An accurate representation of surface processes is essential for weather forecasting as it is where most of the thermal, turbulent and humidity exchanges occur. The Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) system, to represent these exchanges, requires a land-cover classification map to calculate the surface parameters used in the turbulent, radiative, heat, and moisture fluxes estimations.</p><p>The land-cover classification map used in the HARMONIE-AROME configuration of the shared ALADIN-HIRLAM NWP system for operational weather forecasting is ECOCLIMAP. ECOCLIMAP-SG (ECO-SG), the latest version of ECOCLIMAP, was evaluated over Ireland to prepare ECO-SG implementation in HARMONIE-AROME. This evaluation suggested that sparse urban areas are underestimated and instead appear as vegetation areas in ECO-SG [1], with an over-classification of grassland in place of sparse urban areas and other vegetation covers (Met Éireann internal communication). Some limitations in the performance of the current HARMONIE-AROME configuration attributed to surface processes and physiography issues are well-known [2]. This motivated work at Met Éireann to evaluate solutions to improve the land-cover map in HARMONIE-AROME.</p><p>In terms of accuracy, resolution, and the future production of time-varying land-cover map, the use of a convolutional neural network (CNN) to create a land-cover map using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery [3] over Estonia [4] presented better potential outcomes than the use of local datasets [5]. Consequently, this method was tested over Ireland and proven to be more accurate than ECO-SG for representing CORINE Primary and Secondary labels and at a higher resolution [5]. This work is a continuity of [5] focusing on 1. increasing the number of labels, 2. optimising the training procedure, 3. expanding the method for application to other HIRLAM countries and 4. implementation of the new land-cover map in HARMONIE-AROME.</p><p> </p><p>[1] Bessardon, G., Gleeson, E., (2019) Using the best available physiography to improve weather forecasts for Ireland. In EMS Annual Meeting.Retrieved fromhttps://presentations.copernicus.org/EMS2019-702_presentation.pdf</p><p>[2] Bengtsson, L., Andrae, U., Aspelien, T., Batrak, Y., Calvo, J., de Rooy, W.,. . . Køltzow, M. Ø. (2017). The HARMONIE–AROME Model Configurationin the ALADIN–HIRLAM NWP System. Monthly Weather Review, 145(5),1919–1935.https://doi.org/10.1175/mwr-d-16-0417.1</p><p>[3] Bertini, F., Brand, O., Carlier, S., Del Bello, U., Drusch, M., Duca, R., Fernandez, V., Ferrario, C., Ferreira, M., Isola, C., Kirschner, V.,Laberinti, P., Lambert, M., Mandorlo, G., Marcos, P., Martimort, P., Moon, S., Oldeman,P., Palomba, M., and Pineiro, J.: Sentinel-2ESA’s Optical High-ResolutionMission for GMES Operational Services, ESA bulletin. Bulletin ASE. Euro-pean Space Agency, SP-1322,2012</p><p>[4] Ulmas, P. and Liiv, I. (2020). Segmentation of Satellite Imagery using U-Net Models for Land Cover Classification, pp. 1–11,http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.02899, 2020</p><p>[5] Walsh, E., Bessardon, G., Gleeson, E., and Ulmas, P. (2021). Using machine learning to produce a very high-resolution land-cover map for Ireland. Advances in Science and Research, (accepted for publication)</p>


Author(s):  
M. Gašparović ◽  
D. Medak ◽  
I. Pilaš ◽  
L. Jurjević ◽  
I. Balenović

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Different spatial resolutions satellite imagery with global almost daily revisit time provide valuable information about the earth surface in a short time. Based on the remote sensing methods satellite imagery can have different applications like environmental development, urban monitoring, etc. For accurate vegetation detection and monitoring, especially in urban areas, spectral characteristics, as well as the spatial resolution of satellite imagery is important. In this research, 10-m and 20-m Sentinel-2 and 3.7-m PlanetScope satellite imagery were used. Although in nowadays research Sentinel-2 satellite imagery is often used for land-cover classification or vegetation detection and monitoring, we decided to test a fusion of Sentinel-2 imagery with PlanetScope because of its higher spatial resolution. The main goal of this research is a new method for Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope imagery fusion. The fusion method validation was provided based on the land-cover classification accuracy. Three land-cover classifications were made based on the Sentinel-2, PlanetScope and fused imagery. As expected, results show better accuracy for PS and fused imagery than the Sentinel-2 imagery. PlanetScope and fused imagery have almost the same accuracy. For the vegetation monitoring testing, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from Sentinel-2 and fused imagery was calculated and mutually compared. In this research, all methods and tests, image fusion and satellite imagery classification were made in the free and open source programs. The method developed and presented in this paper can easily be applied to other sciences, such as urbanism, forestry, agronomy, ecology and geology.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (23) ◽  
pp. 3880
Author(s):  
Chiman Kwan ◽  
David Gribben ◽  
Bulent Ayhan ◽  
Jiang Li ◽  
Sergio Bernabe ◽  
...  

Accurate vegetation detection is important for many applications, such as crop yield estimation, land cover land use monitoring, urban growth monitoring, drought monitoring, etc. Popular conventional approaches to vegetation detection incorporate the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), which uses the red and near infrared (NIR) bands, and enhanced vegetation index (EVI), which uses red, NIR, and the blue bands. Although NDVI and EVI are efficient, their accuracies still have room for further improvement. In this paper, we propose a new approach to vegetation detection based on land cover classification. That is, we first perform an accurate classification of 15 or more land cover types. The land covers such as grass, shrub, and trees are then grouped into vegetation and other land cover types such as roads, buildings, etc. are grouped into non-vegetation. Similar to NDVI and EVI, only RGB and NIR bands are needed in our proposed approach. If Laser imaging, Detection, and Ranging (LiDAR) data are available, our approach can also incorporate LiDAR in the detection process. Results using a well-known dataset demonstrated that the proposed approach is feasible and achieves more accurate vegetation detection than both NDVI and EVI. In particular, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) approach performed 6% better than NDVI and 50% better than EVI in terms of overall accuracy (OA).


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Endang Savitri ◽  
Irfan Budi Pramono

Land vulnerability is an important information to formulate land rehabilitation activities since it indicates the response of that particular land to erosion. It was determined by several factors such as slope, soil types, rainfall, and land cover. The land cover could be managed to maintain the land vulnerability. Inaccuracies of land cover classification would produce different vulnerabilities, which can cause miscalculation in land rehabilitation planning and implementation. This research is to adjust the existing land cover classification in order to detect land vulnerabilities. The analysis is done by comparing the classification of the existing land cover map with land cover criteria for land vulnerability analysis. The classification result then overlayed with land system map to determine the land vulnerability. The result of a study in Cisadane watershed shows that inaccuracy in determining unirrigated farming into shrub land or moor/open field could affect the shifting of vulnerable class to very vulnerable. Differences in determining plantations and unplanted estate areas with open field could also raise the extent of land vulnerability to 12.3%. Settlement in an urban area that turned into buildings would reduce the level of land vulnerability to 2.1%. Buildings could reduce the land vulnerability due to the impermeable layer would decrease erosion. However, from the hydrological point of view, the impermeable layers would increase the hydrological vulnerability due to the increased runoff and reduced ability to absorb water. Land cover data selection as input to determine the land vulnerability is very important and sensitive. For that reason, in the Cisadane Watershed, dryland farming should be classified as open field and settlement in urban areas should classify as buildings.


Atmosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 1377
Author(s):  
Weifang Shi ◽  
Nan Wang ◽  
Aixuan Xin ◽  
Linglan Liu ◽  
Jiaqi Hou ◽  
...  

Mitigating high air temperatures and heat waves is vital for decreasing air pollution and protecting public health. To improve understanding of microscale urban air temperature variation, this paper performed measurements of air temperature and relative humidity in a field of Wuhan City in the afternoon of hot summer days, and used path analysis and genetic support vector regression (SVR) to quantify the independent influences of land cover and humidity on air temperature variation. The path analysis shows that most effect of the land cover is mediated through relative humidity difference, more than four times as much as the direct effect, and that the direct effect of relative humidity difference is nearly six times that of land cover, even larger than the total effect of the land cover. The SVR simulation illustrates that land cover and relative humidity independently contribute 16.3% and 83.7%, on average, to the rise of the air temperature over the land without vegetation in the study site. An alternative strategy of increasing the humidity artificially is proposed to reduce high air temperatures in urban areas. The study would provide scientific support for the regulation of the microclimate and the mitigation of the high air temperature in urban areas.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eoghan Keany ◽  
Geoffrey Bessardon ◽  
Emily Gleeson

&lt;p&gt;To represent surface thermal, turbulent and humidity exchanges, Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems require a land-cover classification map to calculate sur-face parameters used in surface flux estimation. The latest land-cover classification map used in the HARMONIE-AROME configuration of the shared ALADIN-HIRLAMNWP system for operational weather forecasting is ECOCLIMAP-SG (ECO-SG). The first evaluation of ECO-SG over Ireland suggested that sparse urban areas are underestimated and instead appear as vegetation areas (1). While the work of (2) on land-cover classification helps to correct the horizontal extent of urban areas, the method does not provide information on the vertical characteristics of urban areas. ECO-SG urban classification implicitly includes building heights (3), and any improvement to ECO-SG urban area extent requires a complementary building height dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Openly accessible building height data at a national scale does not exist for the island of Ireland. This work seeks to address this gap in availability by extrapolating the preexisting localised building height data across the entire island. The study utilises information from both the temporal and spatial dimensions by creating band-wise temporal aggregation statistics from morphological operations, for both the Sentinel-1A/B and Sentinel-2A/B constellations (4). The extrapolation uses building height information from the Copernicus Urban Atlas, which contains regional coverage for Dublin at 10 m x10 m resolution (5). Various regression models were then trained on these aggregated statistics to make pixel-wise building height estimates. These model estimates were then evaluated with an adjusted RMSE metric, with the most accurate model chosen to map the entire country. This method relies solely on freely available satellite imagery and open-source software, providing a cost-effective mapping service at a national scale that can be updated more frequently, unlike expensive once-off private mapping services. Furthermore, this process could be applied by these services to reduce costs by taking a small representative sample and extrapolating the rest of the area. This method can be applied beyond national borders providing a uniform map that does not depends on the different private service practices facilitating the updates of global or continental land-cover information used in NWP.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;(1) G. Bessardon and E. Gleeson, &amp;#8220;Using the best available physiography to improve weather forecasts for Ireland,&amp;#8221; in Challenges in High-Resolution Short Range NWP at European level including forecaster-developer cooperation, European Meteorological Society, 2019.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;(2) E. Walsh, et al., &amp;#8220;Using machine learning to produce a very high-resolution land-cover map for Ireland, &amp;#8221; Advances in Science and Research,&amp;#160; (accepted for publication).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;(3) CNRM, &quot;Wiki - ECOCLIMAP-SG&quot; https://opensource.umr-cnrm.fr/projects/ecoclimap-sg/wiki&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;(4) D. Frantz, et al., &amp;#8220;National-scale mapping of building height using sentinel-1 and sentinel-2 time series,&amp;#8221; Remote Sensing of Environment, vol. 252, 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;(5) M. Fitrzyk, et al., &amp;#8220;Esa Copernicus sentinel-1 exploitation activities,&amp;#8221; in IGARSS 2019-2019 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IEEE, 2019.&lt;/p&gt;


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun Joong Kim

Rapidly growing urban areas tend to reveal distinctive spatial and temporal variations of land use/land cover in a locally urbanized environment. In this article, the author analyzes urban growth phenomena at a local scale by employing Geographic Information Systems, remotely sensed image data from 1984, 1994, and 2004, and landscape shape index. Since spatial patterns of land use/land cover changes in small urban areas are not fully examined by the current GIS-based modeling studies or simulation applications, the major objective of this research is to identify and examine the spatial and temporal dynamics of land use changes of urban growth at a local scale. Analytical results demonstrate that sizes, locations, and shapes of new developments are spatio-temporally associated with their landscape variations and major transportation arteries. The key findings from this study contribute to GIS-based urban growth modeling studies and urban planning practices for local communities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 3023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuai Xie ◽  
Liangyun Liu ◽  
Xiao Zhang ◽  
Jiangning Yang ◽  
Xidong Chen ◽  
...  

The Google Earth Engine (GEE) has emerged as an essential cloud-based platform for land-cover classification as it provides massive amounts of multi-source satellite data and high-performance computation service. This paper proposed an automatic land-cover classification method using time-series Landsat data on the GEE cloud-based platform. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land-cover products (MCD12Q1.006) with the International Geosphere–Biosphere Program (IGBP) classification scheme were used to provide accurate training samples using the rules of pixel filtering and spectral filtering, which resulted in an overall accuracy (OA) of 99.2%. Two types of spectral–temporal features (percentile composited features and median composited monthly features) generated from all available Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data from the year 2010 ± 1 were used as input features to a Random Forest (RF) classifier for land-cover classification. The results showed that the monthly features outperformed the percentile features, giving an average OA of 80% against 77%. In addition, the monthly features composited using the median outperformed those composited using the maximum Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) with an average OA of 80% against 78%. Therefore, the proposed method is able to generate accurate land-cover mapping automatically based on the GEE cloud-based platform, which is promising for regional and global land-cover mapping.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Brinkmann ◽  
Ellen Hoffmann ◽  
Andreas Buerkert

Asian megacities have attracted much scientific attention in the context of global urbanization, but few quantitative studies analyze wetland transformation in the rural–urban interface. With its rampant growth and transformation from a tree-lined “Garden City” to a busy megalopolis with often-blocked highways and large built-up areas, Bengaluru (Karnataka, S-India) is a good example for assessing how urbanization has led to the acute degradation of wetlands. We therefore investigated long-term land cover and wetland changes from 1965 to 2018 based on an object-based classification of multi-temporal Corona and Landsat images. To quantify and compare the dynamics of open water surfaces and vegetation, we defined the potential wetland areas (PWA) along the rural–urban gradient and linked our analyses to an index describing the degree of urbanization (survey stratification index (SSI)). During the five decades studied, built-up areas in the Bengaluru Urban district increased ten-fold, with the highest growth rate from 2014 to 2018 (+ 8% annual change). Patches of lake wetlands were highly dynamic in space and time, partly reflecting highly variable annual rainfall patterns ranging from 501 mm in 1965 to 1374 mm in 2005 and monsoon-driven alterations in the hydrologic regime. While water bodies and flooded areas shrunk from 64 km2 in 1965 to 55 km2 in 2018, in 1965, the total rural wetland area with an SSI > 0.5 was twice as high as in 2018. The rural–urban land cover pattern within potential wetland areas changed drastically during this period. This is reflected, for example, by a four-fold increase in the wetland area with an SSI of 0.3, as compared to a decline by 43% in wetland area with an SSI of 0.8. While, in urban areas, wetlands were mostly lost to construction, in areas with a rural character, open water bodies were mainly transformed into green space. The detected changes in urban wetlands were likely accompanied by ecological regime changes, triggering deteriorations in ecosystem services (ESS) which merit further research.


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