Object-based classification of cloudy coastal areas using medium-resolution optical and SAR images for vulnerability assessment of marine disaster

Efficient and accurate access to coastal land cover information is of great significance for marine disaster prevention and mitigation.Although the popular and common sensors of land resource satellites provide free and valuable images to map the land cover,coastal areas often encounter significant cloud cover,especially in tropical areas,which makes the classification in those areas non-ideal.To solve this problem,we proposed a framework of combining medium-resolution optical images and synthetic aperture radar(SAR)data with the recently popular object-based image analysis(OBIA)method and used the Landsat Operational Land Imager(OLI)and Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar(PALSAR)images acquired in Singapore in 2017 as a case study.We designed experiments to confirm two critical factors of this framework:one is the segmentation scale that determines the average object size,and the other is the classification feature.Accuracy assessments of the land cover indicated that the optimal segmentation scale was between 40 and 80,and the features of the combination of OLI and SAR resulted in higher accuracy than any individual features,especially in areas with cloud cover.Based on the land cover generated by this framework,we assessed the vulnerability of the marine disasters of Singapore in 2008 and 2017 and found that the high-vulnerability areas mainly located in the southeast and increased by 118.97 km2 over the past decade.To clarify the disaster response plan for different geographical environments,we classified risk based on altitude and distance from shore.The newly increased high-vulnerability regions within 4 km offshore and below 30 m above sea level are at high risk;these regions may need to focus on strengthening disaster prevention construction.This study serves as a typical example of using remote sensing techniques for the vulnerability assessment of marine disasters,especially those in cloudy coastal areas.

An Object-based Approach for Two-level Gully Feature Mapping Using High-resolution DEM and Imagery： A Case Study on Hilly Loess Plateau Region, China

Gully feature mapping is an indispensable prerequisite for the motioning and control of gully erosion which is a widespread natural hazard. The increasing availability of high-resolution Digital Elevation Model(DEM) and remote sensing imagery, combined with developed object-based methods enables automatic gully feature mapping. But still few studies have specifically focused on gully feature mapping on different scales. In this study, an object-based approach to two-level gully feature mapping, including gully-affected areas and bank gullies, was developed and tested on 1-m DEM and Worldview-3 imagery of a catchment in the Chinese Loess Plateau. The methodology includes a sequence of data preparation, image segmentation, metric calculation, and random forest based classification. The results of the two-level mapping were based on a random forest model after investigating the effects of feature selection and class-imbalance problem. Results show that the segmentation strategy adopted in this paper which considers the topographic information and optimal parameter combination can improve the segmentation results. The distribution of the gully-affected area is closely related to topographic information, however, the spectral features are more dominant for bank gully mapping. The highest overall accuracy of the gully-affected area mapping was 93.06% with four topographic features. The highest overall accuracy of bank gully mapping is 78.5% when all features are adopted. The proposed approach is a creditable option for hierarchical mapping of gully feature information, which is suitable for the application in hily Loess Plateau region.

Temporal sequence Object-based CNN(TS-OCNN) for crop classification from fine resolution remote sensing image time-series

Accurate crop distribution mapping is required for crop yield prediction and field management. Due to rapid progress in remote sensing technology, fine spatial resolution(FSR) remotely sensed imagery now offers great opportunities for mapping crop types in great detail. However, within-class variance can hamper attempts to discriminate crop classes at fine resolutions. Multi-temporal FSR remotely sensed imagery provides a means of increasing crop classification from FSR imagery, although current methods do not exploit the available information fully. In this research, a novel Temporal Sequence Object-based Convolutional Neural Network(TS-OCNN) was proposed to classify agricultural crop type from FSR image time-series. An object-based CNN(OCNN) model was adopted in the TS-OCNN to classify images at the object level(i.e., segmented objects or crop parcels), thus, maintaining the precise boundary information of crop parcels. The combination of image time-series was first utilized as the input to the OCNN model to produce an ‘original’ or baseline classification. Then the single-date images were fed automatically into the deep learning model scene-by-scene in order of image acquisition date to increase successively the crop classification accuracy. By doing so, the joint information in the FSR multi-temporal observations and the unique individual information from the single-date images were exploited comprehensively for crop classification. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was investigated using multitemporal SAR and optical imagery, respectively, over two heterogeneous agricultural areas. The experimental results demonstrated that the newly proposed TS-OCNN approach consistently increased crop classification accuracy, and achieved the greatest accuracies(82.68% and 87.40%) in comparison with state-of-the-art benchmark methods, including the object-based CNN(OCNN)(81.63% and85.88%), object-based image analysis(OBIA)(78.21% and 84.83%), and standard pixel-wise CNN(79.18%and 82.90%). The proposed approach is the first known attempt to explore simultaneously the joint information from image time-series with the unique information from single-date images for crop classification using a deep learning framework. The TS-OCNN, therefore, represents a new approach for agricultural landscape classification from multi-temporal FSR imagery. Besides, it is readily generalizable to other landscapes(e.g., forest landscapes), with a wide application prospect.

Object-based Classification of Baltic Sea Ice Extent and Concentration in Winter 2011

The Baltic Sea is a brackish, mediterranean sea located in the middle latitudes of Europe. It is seasonally covered with ice. The ice covered areas during a typical winter are the Bothnian Bay, the Gulf of Finnland and the Gulf of Riga. Sea ice plays an important role in dynamic and thermodynamic processes and also has a strong impact on the heat budget of the sea. Also a large part of transport goes by sea, and there is a need to create ice charts to make the marine transport safe. Because of high cloudiness in winter season and small amount of light in the northern part of the Baltic Sea, radar data are the most important remote sensing source of sea ice information. The main goal of the following studies is classification of the Baltic sea ice cover using radar data. The ENVISAT ASAR （Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar） acquires data in five different modes. In the following studies ASAR Wide Swath Mode data were used. The Wide Swath Mode, using the ScanSAR technique provides medium resolution images （150 m） over a swath of 405 kin, at HH or VV polarization. In following work data from February 13th, February 24th and April 6th, 2011, representing three different sea ice situations were chosen. OBIA （object-based image analysis） methods and texture parameters were used to create sea ice extent and sea ice concentration charts. Based on object-based methods, it can separate single sea ice floes within the ice pack and calculate more accurately sea ice concentration.

Development of a Generic Model for the Detection of Roof Materials Based on an Object-Based Approach Using WorldView-2 Satellite Imagery

The detection of impervious surface (IS) in heterogeneous urban areas is one of the most challenging tasks in urban remote sensing. One of the limitations in IS detection at the parcel level is the lack of sufficient training data. In this study, a generic model of spatial distribution of roof materials is considered to overcome this limitation. A generic model that is based on spectral, spatial and textural information which is extracted from available training data is proposed. An object-based approach is used to extract the information inherent in the image. Furthermore, linear discriminant analysis is used for dimensionality reduction and to discriminate between different spatial, spectral and textural attributes. The generic model is composed of a discriminant function based on linear combinations of the predictor variables that provide the best discrimination among the groups. The discriminate analysis result shows that of the 54 attributes extracted from the WorldView-2 image, only 13 attributes related to spatial, spectral and textural information are useful for discriminating different roof materials. Finally, this model is applied to different WorldView-2 images from different areas and proves that this model has good potential to predict roof materials from the WorldView-2 images without using training data.

Integration of SAR Polarimetric Features and Multi-spectral Data for Object-Based Land Cover Classification

An object-based approach is proposed for land cover classification using optimal polarimetric parameters.The ability to identify targets is effectively enhanced by the integration of SAR and optical images.The innovation of the presented method can be summarized in the following two main points:①estimating polarimetric parameters(H-A-Alpha decomposition)through the optical image as a driver;②a multi-resolution segmentation based on the optical image only is deployed to refine classification results.The proposed method is verified by using Sentinel-1/2 datasets over the Bakersfield area,California.The results are compared against those from pixel-based SVM classification using the ground truth from the National Land Cover Database(NLCD).A detailed accuracy assessment complied with seven classes shows that the proposed method outperforms the conventional approach by around 10%,with an overall accuracy of 92.6%over regions with rich texture.

Object-Based vs. Pixel-Based Classification of Mangrove Forest Mapping in Vien An Dong Commune, Ngoc Hien District, Ca Mau Province Using VNREDSat-1 Images

Many researches have been performed comparing object-based classification (OBC) and pixel-based classification (PBC), particularly in classifying high-resolution satellite images. VNREDSat-1 is the first optical remote sensing satellite of Vietnam with resolution of 2.5 m (Panchromatic) and 10 m (Multispectral). The objective of this research is to compare two classification approaches using VNREDSat-1 image for mapping mangrove forest in Vien An Dong commune, Ngoc Hien district, Ca Mau province. ISODATA algorithm (in PBC method) and membership function classifier (in OBC method) were chosen to classify the same image. The results show that the overall accuracies of OBC and PBC are 73% and 62.16% respectively, and OBC solved the “salt and pepper” which is the main issue of PBC as well. Therefore, OBC is supposed to be the better approach to classify VNREDSat-1 for mapping mangrove forest in Ngoc Hien commune.

OBH-RSI:Object-Based Hierarchical Classification Using Remote Sensing Indices for Coastal Wetland

With the deterioration of the environment,it is imperative to protect coastal wetlands.Using multi-source remote sensing data and object-based hierarchical classification to classify coastal wetlands is an effective method.The object-based hierarchical classification using remote sensing indices(OBH-RSI)for coastal wetland is proposed to achieve fine classification of coastal wetland.First,the original categories are divided into four groups according to the category characteristics.Second,the training and test maps of each group are extracted according to the remote sensing indices.Third,four groups are passed through the classifier in order.Finally,the results of the four groups are combined to get the final classification result map.The experimental results demonstrate that the overall accuracy,average accuracy and kappa coefficient of the proposed strategy are over 94%using the Yellow River Delta dataset.

Object-based Analysis for Extraction of Dominant Tree Species

As forest is of great significance for our whole development and the sustainable plan is so focus on it. It is very urgent for us to have the whole distribution,stock volume and other related information about that. So the forest inventory program is on our schedule. Aiming at dealing with the problem in extraction of dominant tree species,we tested the highly hot method-object-based analysis. Based on the ALOS image data,we combined multi-resolution in e Cognition software and fuzzy classification algorithm. Through analyzing the segmentation results,we basically extract the spruce,the pine,the birch and the oak of the study area. Both the spectral and spatial characteristics were derived from those objects,and with the help of GLCM,we got the differences of each species. We use confusion matrix to do the Classification accuracy assessment compared with the actual ground data and this method showed a comparatively good precision as 87% with the kappa coefficient 0. 837.

Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis of Changes in Land Cover in the Coastal Zones of the Red River Delta (Vietnam)

The majority of the population and economic activity of the northern half of Vietnam is clustered in the Red River Delta and about half of the country’s rice production takes place here. There are significant problems associated with its geographical position and the intensive exploitation of resources by an overabundant population (population density of 962 inhabitants/km2). Some thirty years after the economic liberalization and the opening of the country to international markets, agricultural land use patterns in the Red River Delta, particularly in the coastal area, have undergone many changes. Remote sensing is a particularly powerful tool in processing and providing spatial information for monitoring land use changes. The main methodological objective is to find a solution to process the many heterogeneous coastal land use parameters, so as to describe it in all its complexity, specifically by making use of the latest European satellite data (Sentinel-2). This complexity is due to local variations in ecological conditions, but also to anthropogenic factors that directly and indirectly influence land use dynamics. The methodological objective was to develop a new Geographic Object-based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) approach for mapping coastal areas using Sentinel-2 data and Landsat 8. By developing a new segmentation, accuracy measure, in this study was determined that segmentation accuracies decrease with increasing segmentation scales and that the negative impact of under-segmentation errors significantly increases at a large scale. An Estimation of Scale Parameter (ESP) tool was then used to determine the optimal segmentation parameter values. A popular machine learning algorithms (Random Forests-RFs) is used. For all classifications algorithm, an increase in overall accuracy was observed with the full synergistic combination of available data sets.

Object-Based Analysis of Multispectral RS Data and GIS for Detection of Climate Change Impact on the Karakoram Range Northern Pakistan

Changing climate has a great impact on northern area of Pakistan＇s environment and is more prone to environmental changes impacts than rest of the country due to its high elevation. However, melting glaciers effect not only the local environment but also the whole country with frequent and heavy floods. Remote sensing （RS） from Satellites and Airplanes used in Geographical Information Systems （GIS） are technologies that can aid in understanding the on-going environmental processes. Furthermore, help researchers to observe, understand, forecast and suggest response to changes that occur. It can be natural disasters or man-made disasters and human induced factors. Still analysis accuracy issues play a vital role for the formulation of any strategy. To achieve better results, object based analysis methods have been tested. Various algorithms are developed by the analysts to calculate the magnitude of land cover changes. However, they must be evaluated for each environment that is under observation as mountainous areas. Here were object-based methods evaluated in comparison with pixel based. Landslides, soil moisture, soil permeability, snow cover and vegetation cover can be effectively monitored by those methods.

Object-based image analysis for mapping geomorphic zones of coral reefs in the Xisha Islands, China

Mapping regional spatial patterns of coral reef geomorphology provides the primary information to understand the constructive processes in the reef ecosystem. However, this work is challenged by the pixel-based image classification method for its comparatively low accuracy. In this paper, an object-based image analysis(OBIA)method was presented to map intra-reef geomorphology of coral reefs in the Xisha Islands, China using Landsat 8satellite imagery. Following the work of the Millennium Coral Reef Mapping Project, a regional reef class hierarchy with ten geomorphic classes was first defined. Then, incorporating the hierarchical concept and integrating the spectral and additional spatial information such as context, shape and contextual relationships, a large-scale geomorphic map was produced by OBIA with accuracies generally more than 80%. Although the robustness of OBIA has been validated in the applications of coral reef mapping from individual reefs to reef system in this paper, further work is still required to improve its transferability.

Identifying Alpine Wetlands in the Damqu River Basin in the Source Area of the Yangtze River Using Object-based Classification Method

Alpine wetlands are very sensitive to global change, have great impacts on the hydrological condition of rivers, and are closely related to peoples＇ living in lower reaches. It is essential to monitor alpine wetland changes to appropriately manage and protect wetland resources; however, it is quite difficult to accurately extract such information from remote sensing images due to spectral confusion and arduous field verification. In this study, we identified different wetland types in the Damqu River Basin located in the Yangze River source region from Landsat remote sensing data using the object-based method. In order to ensure the interpretation accuracy of wetland, a digital elevation model （DEM） and its derived data （slope, aspect）, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index （NDVI）, Normalized Difference Water Index （NDWI）, and Kauth-Thomas transformation were considered as the components of the spectral characteristics of wetland types. The spectral characteristics, texture features and spatial structure characteristics of each wetland type were comprehensively analyzed based on the success of image segmentation. The extraction rules for each wetland type were established by determining the thresholds of the spatial, texture and spectral attributes of typical parameter layers according to their histogram statistics. The classification accuracy was assessed using error matrixes and field survey verification data. According to the accuracy assessment, the total accuracy of image classification was 89%.

A new approach toward object-based change detection

Object-based change detection has been the hotspot in remote sensing image processing.A new approach toward object-based change detection is proposed.The two different temporal images are unitedly segmented using the mean shift procedure to obtain corresponding objects.Then change detection is implemented based on the integration of corresponding objects’ intensity and texture differences.Experiments are conducted on both panchromatic images and multispectral images and the results show that the integrated measure is robust with respect to illumination changes and noise.Supplementary color detection is conducted to determine whether the color of the unchanged objects changes or not when dealing with multispectral images.Some verification work is carried out to show the accuracy of the proposed approach.

Object-based classification approach for greenhouse mapping using Landsat-8 imagery

Suburban greenhouses with intensive agricultural productivity have increasingly influenced the daily diet and vegetable supply in Chinese cities.With their enormous input of fertilizers and pesticides,greenhouses have considerably changed the local soil quality and environmental risk factors.The ability to obtain timely and accurate information regarding the spatial distribution of greenhouses could make an important contribution to local agricultural management and soil protection.This paper attempts to present a practical framework for extracting suburban greenhouses,integrating remote sensing data from Landsat-8 and object-oriented classification.Inheritance classification was implemented,and various properties,including texture and neighborhood features in addition to spectral information,were investigated through the popular random forest technique for feature selection prior to SVM classification to improve the mapping accuracy.The results demonstrated that object-based classification incorporating non-spectral features yielded a significant improvement compared with the classification results obtained using only the spectral information in traditional per-pixel classification.Both the producer’s and user’s accuracy were higher than 85%for greenhouse identification.Although it remained a challenge to completely distinguish greenhouses from sparse plants,the final greenhouse map indicated that the proposed object-based classification scheme,providing multiple feature selections and multi-scale analysis,yielded worthwhile information when applied to a continuous series of the freely available Landsat-8 imagery data.

Incorporating DeepLabv3+and object-based image analysis for semantic segmentation of very high resolution remote sensing images

Semantic segmentation of remote sensing images is an important but unsolved problem in the remote sensing society.Advanced image semantic segmentation models,such as DeepLabv3+,have achieved astonishing performance for semantically labeling very high resolution(VHR)remote sensing images.However,it is difficult for these models to capture the precise outlines of ground objects and explore the context information that revealing relationships among image objects for optimizing segmentation results.Consequently,this study proposes a semantic segmentation method for VHR images by incorporating deep learning semantic segmentation model(DeepLabv3+)and objectbased image analysis(OBIA),wherein DSM is employed to provide geometric information to enhance the interpretation of VHR images.The proposed method first obtains two initial probabilistic labeling predictions using a DeepLabv3+network on spectral image and a random forest(RF)classifier on hand-crafted features,respectively.These two predictions are then integrated by Dempster-Shafer(D-S)evidence theory to be fed into an object-constrained higher-order conditional random field(CRF)framework to estimate the final semantic labeling results with the consideration of the spatial contextual information.The proposed method is applied to the ISPRS 2D semantic labeling benchmark,and competitive overall accuracies of 90.6%and 85.0%are achieved for Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets,respectively.

A Scale Sequence Object-based Convolutional Neural Network(SS-OCNN)for crop classification from fine spatial resolution remotely sensed imagery

The highly dynamic nature of agro-ecosystems in space and time usually leads to high intra-class variance and low inter-class separability in the fine spatial resolution(FSR)remotely sensed imagery.This makes traditional classifiers essentially relying on spectral information for crop mapping from FSR imagery an extremely challenging task.To mine effectively the rich spectral and spatial information in FSR imagery,this paper proposed a Scale Sequence Object-based Convolutional Neural Network(SS-OCNN)that classifies images at the object level by taking segmented objects(crop parcels)as basic units of analysis,thus,ensuring that the boundaries between crop parcels are delineated precisely.These segmented objects were subsequently classified using a CNN model integrated with an automatically generated scale sequence of input patch sizes.This scale sequence can fuse effectively the features learned at different scales by transforming progressively the information extracted at small scales to larger scales.The effectiveness of the SS-OCNN was investigated using two heterogeneous agricultural areas with FSR SAR and optical imagery,respectively.Experimental results revealed that the SS-OCNN consistently achieved the most accurate classification results.The SS-OCNN,thus,provides a new paradigm for crop classification over heterogeneous areas using FSR imagery,and has a wide application prospect.

Using object-based analysis to derive surface complexity information for improved filtering of airborne laser scanning data

Airborne laser scanning （ALS） is a technique used to obtain Digital Surface Models （DSM） and Digital Terrain Models （DTM） efficiently, and filtering is the key procedure used to derive DTM from point clouds. Generating seed points is an initial step for most filtering algorithms, whereas existing algorithms usually define a regular window size to generate seed points. This may lead to an inadequate density of seed points, and further introduce error type I, especially in steep terrain and forested areas. In this study, we propose the use of object- based analysis to derive surface complexity information from ALS datasets, which can then be used to improve seed point generation. We assume that an area is complex if it is composed of many small objects, with no buildings within the area. Using these assumptions, we propose and implement a new segmentation algorithm based on a grid index, which we call the Edge and Slope Restricted Region Growing （ESRGG） algorithm. Surface complexity information is obtained by statistical analysis of the number of objects derived by segmentation in each area. Then, for complex areas, a smaller window size is defined to generate seed points. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm could greatly improve the filtering results in complex areas, especially in steep terrain and forested areas.

Object-based image analysis of suburban landscapes using Landsat-8 imagery

Many experiments of object-based image analysis have been conducted in remote sensing classification.However,they commonly used highresolution imagery and rarely focused on suburban area.In this research,with the Landsat-8 imagery,classification of a suburban area via the object-based approach is achieved using four classifiers,including decision tree(DT),support vector machine(SVM),random trees(RT),and naive Bayes(NB).We performed feature selection at different sizes of segmentation scale and evaluated the effects of segmentation and tuning parameters within each classifier on classification accuracy.The results showed that the influence of shape on overall accuracy was greater than that of compactness,and a relatively low value of shape should be set with increasing scale size.For DT,the optimal maximum depth usually varied from 5 to 8.For SVM,the optimal gamma was less than or equal to 10^(-2),and its optimal C was greater than or equal to 10^(2).For RT,the optimal active variables was less than or equal to 4,and the optimal maximum tree number was greater than or equal to 30.Furthermore,although there was no statistically significant difference between some classification results produced using different classifiers,SVM has a slightly better performance.

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.