Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar change detection for specific land cover types

This paper presents a supervised polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) change detection method applied to specific land cover types. For each pixel of a PolSAR image, its target scattering vector can be modeled as having a complex multivariate normal distribution. Based on this assumption, the joint distribution of two corresponding vectors in a pair of PolSAR images is derived. Then, a generalized likelihood ratio test statistic for the equality of two likelihood functions of such joint distribution is considered and a maximum likelihood distance measure for specific land cover types is presented. Subsequently, the Kittler and Illingworth minimum error threshold segmentation method is applied to extract the specific changed areas. Experiments on two repeat-pass Radarsat-2 fully polarimetric images of Suzhou, China, demonstrate that the proposed change detection method gives a good performance in determining the specific changed areas in PolSAR images, especially the areas that have changed to water.     

煤矿“一张图”概念及其体系结构研究

结合参与国土资源部"一张图"工程的亲身感受及其所取得的成果,并在分析了煤矿信息化建设存在不足的基础上,提出了煤矿"一张图"的概念及其体系结构,详细探讨了煤矿"一张图"的关键技术和构建步骤,最后结合煤矿"一张图"的体系结构,分析了其在矿区安全监测监控管理中的应用,实现了基于采掘工程平面图的监测监控、人员定位应用等。     

FCM聚类算法协同Canny算子的遥感影像边缘检测方法

提出一种FCM聚类算法协同Canny算子的遥感影像边缘检测方法,算法采用中值滤波消除原始遥感影像中的非高斯噪声;采用FCM(Fuzzy C-mean)聚类算法将滤波处理后的遥感影像中的像素分为两类:边缘类像素和非边缘类像素,并得到聚类影像;最后采用Canny算子对聚类影像进行边缘检测得到遥感影像地物边缘信息。实验结果表明,文中提出的方法能有效消除遥感影像中的混合噪声并准确地检测出地物目标的边缘,是一种有效的遥感影像边缘检测方法。     

基于北斗卫星的水汽探测性能分析

本文利用北斗试验网的数据,结合探空观测,对北斗系统与GPS系统,北斗、GPS与探空系统之间进行详细的比较分析,对北斗水汽探测性能及精度给出初步分析结果。北斗系统与GPS系统及探空系统大气可降水量的探测结果较一致,很好地反映了大气可降水量的变化情况;北斗系统解算出的大气可降水量大于GPS系统,两个系统间存在2~3.3 mm的系统误差,水汽含量较低时,一致性更好;北斗系统与探空的系统误差和标准偏差较大,定位定轨模型有待优化,系统稳定性有待提高。     

利用分形和多尺度分析的中低分辨率SAR图像变化检测

对于合成孔径雷达(synthetic aperture radar,SAR)图像像素级变化检测,常见的对数比、交叉熵差异图在提取建筑物等人造目标的变化时不能保持其结构特征。本文将分形维数引入到差异图构造中,定义了分形-对数比(fractal dimension-log ratio, FD-LR)融合差异图,在有效提取不同地物类型变化的同时,能够保持其轮廓结构。为克服斑噪干扰,对FD-LR进行多尺度分析,通过贝叶斯分割和决策级融合提取变化信息。实验结果表明,该方法模型简单,能够有效检测不同地物类型的变化,在中低分辨率复杂场景的SAR图像变化检测中具有优势。     

地表覆盖遥感产品更新完善的研究动向

近年来,多尺度地表覆盖遥感产品的不断涌现,为环境变化研究、地球系统模拟、地理国(世)情监测和可持续发展规划等提供了重要科学数据。为更好地满足广大用户日益增长的应用需求,应对地表覆盖遥感产品进行持续更新完善,保持其时效性、增强时序性、丰富多样性。针对大面积地表覆盖遥感产品更新完善所面临的主要问题,介绍和评述了国内外有关研究动向,包括影像与众源信息相结合的更新、数据类型细化与完善、地表覆盖真实性验证,并作了简要展望。     

Retrieval of effective leaf area index (LAIe) and leaf area density (LAD) profile at individual tree level using high density multi-return airborne LiDAR

As an important canopy structure indicator, leaf area index (LAI) proved to be of considerable implications for forest ecosystem and ecological studies, and efficient techniques for accurate LAI acquisitions have long been highlighted. Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR), often termed as airborne laser scanning (ALS), once was extensively investigated for this task but showed limited performance due to its low sampling density. Now, ALS systems exhibit more competing capacities such as high density and multi-return sampling, and hence, people began to ask the questions like—“can ALS now work better on the task of LAI prediction?” As a re-examination, this study investigated the feasibility of LAI retrievals at the individual tree level based on high density and multi-return ALS, by directly considering the vertical distributions of laser points lying within each tree crown instead of by proposing feature variables such as quantiles involving laser point distribution modes at the plot level. The examination was operated in the case of four tree species (i.e. Picea abies, Pinus sylvestris, Populus tremula and Quercus robur) in a mixed forest, with their LAI-related reference data collected by using static terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). In light of the differences between ALS- and TLS-based LAI characterizations, the methods of voxelization of 3D scattered laser points, effective LAI (LAIe) that does not distinguish branches from canopies and unified cumulative LAI (ucLAI) that is often used to characterize the vertical profiles of crown leaf area densities (LADs) was used; then, the relationships between the ALS- and TLS-derived LAIes were determined, and so did ucLAIs. Tests indicated that the tree-level LAIes for the four tree species can be estimated based on the used airborne LiDAR (R² = 0.07, 0.26, 0.43 and 0.21, respectively) and their ucLAIs can also be derived. Overall, this study has validated the usage of the contemporary high density multi-return airborne LiDARs for LAIe and LAD profile retrievals at the individual tree level, and the contribution are of high potential for advancing forest ecosystem modeling and ecological understanding.     

Soil salinity and vegetation cover change detection from multi-temporal remotely sensed imagery in Al Hassa Oasis in Saudi Arabia

Detecting soil salinity changes and its impact on vegetation cover are necessary to understand the relationships between these changes in vegetation cover. This study aims to determine the changes in soil salinity and vegetation cover in Al Hassa Oasis over the past 28 years and investigates whether the salinity change causing the change in vegetation cover. Landsat time series data of years 1985, 2000 and 2013 were used to generate Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Soil Salinity Index (SI) images, which were then used in image differencing to identify vegetation and salinity change/no-change for two periods. Soil salinity during 2000–2013 exhibits much higher increase compared to 1985–2000, while the vegetation cover declined to 6.31% for the same period. Additionally, highly significant (p < 0.0001) negative relationships found between the NDVI and SI differencing images, confirmed the potential long-term linkage between the changes in soil salinity and vegetation cover.     

Region of interest extraction via common salient feature analysis and feedback reinforcement strategy for remote sensing images

Saliency detection is an effective approach to extract regions of interest (ROIs) for remote sensing images. However, existing saliency detection models mainly focus on ROI extraction from a single image and usually are not able to produce satisfactory results because of complex background interference in remote sensing images. The employment of mutual information in a set of remote sensing images can provide an effective solution to this issue. In this paper, we propose a novel saliency detection model for multiple remote sensing images to simultaneously extract ROIs and identify images without ROIs. First, common salient feature analysis based on synthesized feature clustering and global contrast is implemented to exploit global correspondence in the synthesis feature domain, thereby highlighting preliminary ROIs against background interference and assigning lower saliency values to images without ROIs. Then, we design an exclusion criterion based on saliency value judgment to remove images without ROIs, and the remaining saliency maps are refined by an enhancement strategy. Finally, the enhanced maps serve as a feedback to yield a homogenous synthesized feature space in which integral ROIs with subtle borders are extracted by the reused cluster-based saliency calculation. Experiments reveal that our model outperforms seven state-of-the-art models by achieving the best ROC curve (AUC = 0.945) and maximal F-measure at 0.729.     

Evaluation of effectiveness of three fuzzy systems and three texture extraction methods for building damage detection from post-event LiDAR data

Building damage maps after disasters can help us to better manage the rescue operations. Researchers have used Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data for extracting the building damage maps. For producing building damage maps from LiDAR data in a rapid manner, it is necessary to understand the effectiveness of features and classifiers. However, there is no comprehensive study on the performance of features and classifiers in identifying damaged areas. In this study, the effectiveness of three texture extraction methods and three fuzzy systems for producing the building damage maps was investigated. In the proposed method, at first, a pre-processing stage was utilized to apply essential processes on post-event LiDAR data. Second, textural features were extracted from the pre-processed LiDAR data. Third, fuzzy inference systems were generated to make a relation between the extracted textural features of buildings and their damage extents. The proposed method was tested across three areas over the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Three building damage maps with overall accuracies of 75.0%, 78.1% and 61.4% were achieved. Based on outcomes, the fuzzy inference systems were stronger than random forest, bagging, boosting and support vector machine classifiers for detecting damaged buildings.