The mathematical weighting of GNSS observations based on different types of receivers/antennas and environmental conditions

Stochastic models play an important role in achieving high accuracy in positioning,the ideal estimator in the least-squares(LS)can be obtained only by using the suitable stochastic model.This study investigates the role of variance component estimation(VCE)in the LS method for Precise Point Positioning(PPP).This estimation is performed by considering the ionospheric-free(IF)functional model for code and the phase observation of Global Positioning System(GPS).The strategy for estimating the accuracy of these observations was evaluated to check the effect of the stochastic model in four modes:a)antenna type,b)receiver type,c)the tropospheric effect,and d)the ionosphere effect.The results show that using empirical variance for code and phase observations in some cases caused erroneous estimation of unknown components in the PPP model.This is because a constant empirical variance may not be suitable for various receivers and antennas under different conditions.Coordinates were compared in two cases using the stochastic model of nominal weight and weight estimated by LS-VCE.The position error difference for the east-west,north-south,and height components was 1.5 cm,4 mm,and 1.8 cm,respectively.Therefore,weight estimation with LS-VCE can provide more appropriate results.Eventually,the convergence time based on four elevation-dependent models was evaluated using nominal weight and LS-VCE weight.According to the results,the LS-VCE has a higher convergence rate than the nominal weight.The weight estimation using LS-VCE improves the convergence time in four elevation-dependent models by 11,13,12,and 9 min,respectively.

Object-based classification of hyperspectral data using Random Forest algorithm

This paper presents a new framework for object-based classification of high-resolution hyperspectral data.This multi-step framework is based on multi-resolution segmentation(MRS)and Random Forest classifier(RFC)algorithms.The first step is to determine of weights of the input features while using the object-based approach with MRS to processing such images.Given the high number of input features,an automatic method is needed for estimation of this parameter.Moreover,we used the Variable Importance(VI),one of the outputs of the RFC,to determine the importance of each image band.Then,based on this parameter and other required parameters,the image is segmented into some homogenous regions.Finally,the RFC is carried out based on the characteristics of segments for converting them into meaningful objects.The proposed method,as well as,the conventional pixel-based RFC and Support Vector Machine(SVM)method was applied to three different hyperspectral data-sets with various spectral and spatial characteristics.These data were acquired by the HyMap,the Airborne Prism Experiment(APEX),and the Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager(CASI)hyperspectral sensors.The experimental results show that the proposed method is more consistent for land cover mapping in various areas.The overall classification accuracy(OA),obtained by the proposed method was 95.48,86.57,and 84.29%for the HyMap,the APEX,and the CASI datasets,respectively.Moreover,this method showed better efficiency in comparison to the spectralbased classifications because the OAs of the proposed method was 5.67 and 3.75%higher than the conventional RFC and SVM classifiers,respectively.