Change Detection of Salt Affected Land Area of Unnao District in Uttar Pradesh using Remote Sensing and GIS

Reasons for excess salt in soil are due to both natural and anthropogenic activities. About 955Mha Sodic soil is present in worldwide out of which about 60% is cultivable area. This has huge impact on economic and agricultural production. Salt affected soil is locally called as reh, thur, chopan and kallar. Traditional methods are time consuming and expensive. This can be only fulfilled by using emerging technologies like remote sensing and GIS which are economical and easy in less time. Remote sensing is a technique using to conquer information without in being touch with that object. Remote sensing is very helpful for in temporal changes and spatial changes. So with the help of remote sensing mapping of salt affected area of Unnao district using satellite data of LISS-III of year 2012 and 2018 to calculate spatial changes in between this year and suggest some methods and techniques for reclamation. Analysis shows that Sodic area in Unnao is decreasing and awareness about reclamation of Sodic soil with new techniques is spreading among farmers. In this study, Unnao district has been taken as the study area for mapping and monitoring the change detection with respect to salt affected lands. Salt affected land covers mapped is 14495.63 ha area in 2012 in the district. But in 2018, the total area of salt affected lands has been decreased by 11054.62 ha. The major areas that have been reported having large salt affected land are Auras, Bichhiya & Mianganj Blocks.

Night-Time Light Remote Sensing Mapping: Construction and Analysis of Ethnic Minority Development Index

Using toponym data, population data, and night-time light data, we visualized the development index of the Yi, Wa, Zhuang, Naxi, Hani, and Dai ethnic groups on ArcGIS as well as the distribution of 25 ethnic minorities in the study area. First, we extracted the toponym data of 25 ethnic minorities in the study area, combined with night-time light data and the population proportion data of each ethnic group, then we obtained the development index of each ethnic group in the study area. We compared the development indexes of the Yi, Wa, Zhuang, Naxi, Hani, and Dai ethnic groups with higher development indexes. The results show that the Yi nationality’s development index was the highest, reaching 28.86 (with two decimal places), and the Dai nationality’s development index was the lowest (15.22). The areas with the highest minority development index were concentrated in the core area of the minority development, and the size varied with the minority’s distance. According to the distribution of ethnic minorities, we found that the Yi ethnic group was distributed in almost the entire study area, while other ethnic minorities had obvious geographical distribution characteristics, and there were multiple ethnic minorities living together. This research is of great significance to the cultural protection of ethnic minorities, the development of ethnic minorities, and the remote sensing mapping of lights at night.

Drone Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Review

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used in many challenging and diversified applications. These applications belong to the civilian and the military fields. To name a few; infrastructure inspection, traffic patrolling, remote sensing, mapping, surveillance, rescuing humans and animals, environment monitoring, and Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) operations. However, the use of UAVs in these applications needs a substantial level of autonomy. In other words, UAVs should have the ability to accomplish planned missions in unexpected situations without requiring human intervention. To ensure this level of autonomy, many artificial intelligence algorithms were designed. These algorithms targeted the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) of UAVs. In this paper, we described the state of the art of one subset of these algorithms: the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques. We made a detailed description of them, and we deduced the current limitations in this area. We noted that most of these DRL methods were designed to ensure stable and smooth UAV navigation by training computer-simulated environments. We realized that further research efforts are needed to address the challenges that restrain their deployment in real-life scenarios.

Rapid Mapping of Large-Scale Greenhouse Based on Integrated Learning Algorithm and Google Earth Engine

A greenhouse is an important land-use type, which can effectively improve agricultural production conditions and increase crop yields. It is of great significance to obtain the spatial distribution data of greenhouses quickly and accurately for regional agricultural production and food security. Based on the Google Earth Engine cloud platform and Landsat 8 images, this study selected a total of 18 indicators from three aspects of spectral features, texture features and terrain features to construct greenhouse identification features. From a variety of classification algorithms for remote-sensing recognition of greenhouses, this study selected three classifiers with higher accuracy (classification and regression trees (CART), random forest model (randomForest) and maximum entropy model (gmoMaxEnt)) to construct an integrated classification algorithm, and then extracted the spatial distribution data of greenhouses in Jiangsu Province. The results show that: (1) Google Earth Engine with its own massive data and cloud computing capabilities, combined with integrated classification algorithms, can achieve rapid remote-sensing mapping of large-scale greenhouses under complex terrain, and the classification accuracy is higher than that of a single classification algorithm. (2) The combination of different spectral, texture and terrain features has a greater impact on the extraction of regional greenhouses, the combination of all three aspects of features has the highest accuracy. Spectral features are the key factors for greenhouse remote-sensing mapping, but terrain and texture features can also enhance classification accuracy. (3) The greenhouse in Jiangsu Province has significant spatial differentiation and spatial agglomeration characteristics. The most widely distributed greenhouses are mainly concentrated in the agriculturally developed areas such as Dongtai City, Hai’an County, Rudong County and Pizhou City.

Techniques for the Automatic Detection and Hiding of Sensitive Targets in Emergency Mapping Based on Remote Sensing Data

Emergency remote sensing mapping can provide support for decision making in disaster assessment or disaster relief, and therefore plays an important role in disaster response. Traditional emergency remote sensing mapping methods use decryption algorithms based on manual retrieval and image editing tools when processing sensitive targets. Although these traditional methods can achieve target recognition, they are inefficient and cannot meet the high time efficiency requirements of disaster relief. In this paper, we combined an object detection model with a generative adversarial network model to build a two-stage deep learning model for sensitive target detection and hiding in remote sensing images, and we verified the model performance on the aircraft object processing problem in remote sensing mapping. To improve the experimental protocol, we introduced a modification to the reconstruction loss function, candidate frame optimization in the region proposal network, the PointRend algorithm, and a modified attention mechanism based on the characteristics of aircraft objects. Experiments revealed that our method is more efficient than traditional manual processing; the precision is 94.87%, the recall is 84.75% higher than that of the original mask R-CNN model, and the F1-score is 44% higher than that of the original model. In addition, our method can quickly and intelligently detect and hide sensitive targets in remote sensing images, thereby shortening the time needed for emergency mapping.

Estimating Crop LAI Using Spectral Feature Extraction and the Hybrid Inversion Method

The leaf area index (LAI) is an essential indicator used in crop growth monitoring. In the study, a hybrid inversion method, which combined a physical model with a statistical method, was proposed to estimate the crop LAI. The simulated compact high-resolution imaging spectrometer (CHRIS) canopy spectral crop reflectance datasets were generated using the PROSAIL model (the coupling of PROSPECT leaf optical properties model and Scattering by Arbitrarily Inclined Leaves model) and the CHRIS band response function. Partial least squares (PLS) was then used to reduce the dimension of the simulated spectral data. Using the principal components (PCs) of PLS as the model inputs, the hybrid inversion models were built using various modeling algorithms, including the backpropagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN), least squares support vector regression (LS-SVR), and random forest regression (RFR). Finally, remote sensing mapping of the CHRIS data was achieved with the hybrid model to test the inversion accuracy of LAI estimates. The validation result yielded an accuracy of R2 = 0.939 and normalized root-mean-square error (NRMSE) = 6.474% for the PLS_RFR model, which indicated that the crops LAI could be estimated accurately by using spectral feature extraction and a hybrid inversion strategy. The results showed that the model based on principal components extracted by PLS had a good estimation accuracy and noise immunity and was the preferred method for LAI estimation. Furthermore, the comparative analysis results of various datasets showed that prior knowledge could improve the precision of the retrieved LAI, and using this information to constrain parameters (e.g., chlorophyll content or LAI), which make important contributions to the spectra, is the key to this improvement. In addition, among the PLS, BP-ANN, LS-SVR, and RFR methods, RFR was the optimal modeling algorithm in the paper, as indicated by the high R2 and low NRMSE in various datasets.