Transformer-Based Cloud Detection Method for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Cloud detection from satellite and drone imagery is crucial for applications such as weather forecasting and environmentalmonitoring.Addressing the limitations of conventional convolutional neural networks,we propose an innovative transformer-based method.This method leverages transformers,which are adept at processing data sequences,to enhance cloud detection accuracy.Additionally,we introduce a Cyclic Refinement Architecture that improves the resolution and quality of feature extraction,thereby aiding in the retention of critical details often lost during cloud detection.Our extensive experimental validation shows that our approach significantly outperforms established models,excelling in high-resolution feature extraction and precise cloud segmentation.By integrating Positional Visual Transformers(PVT)with this architecture,our method advances high-resolution feature delineation and segmentation accuracy.Ultimately,our research offers a novel perspective for surmounting traditional challenges in cloud detection and contributes to the advancement of precise and dependable image analysis across various domains.

High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery for the Recognition of Traditional Villages

Traditional Chinese villages,vital carriers of traditional culture,have faced significant alterations due to urbanization in recent years,urgently necessitating artificial intelligence data updates.This study integrates high spatial resolution remote sensing imagery with deep learning techniques,proposing a novel method for identifying rooftops of traditional Chinese village buildings using high-definition remote sensing images.Using 0.54 m spatial resolution imagery of traditional village areas as the data source,this method analyzes the geometric and spectral image characteristics of village building rooftops.It constructs a deep learning feature sample library tailored to the target types.Employing a semantically enhanced version of the improved Mask R-CNN(Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network)for building recognition,the study conducts experiments on localized imagery from different regions.The results demonstrated that the modified Mask R-CNN effectively identifies traditional village building rooftops,achieving an of 0.7520 and an of 0.7400.It improves the current problem of misidentification and missed detection caused by feature heterogeneity.This method offers a viable and effective approach for industrialized data monitoring of traditional villages,contributing to their sustainable development.

Remote sensing of air pollution incorporating integrated-path differential-absorption and coherent-Doppler lidar

An innovative complex lidar system deployed on an airborne rotorcraft platform for remote sensing of atmospheric pollution is proposed and demonstrated.The system incorporates integrated-path differential absorption lidar(DIAL) and coherent-doppler lidar(CDL) techniques using a dual tunable TEA CO_(2)laser in the 9—11 μm band and a 1.55 μm fiber laser.By combining the principles of differential absorption detection and pulsed coherent detection,the system enables agile and remote sensing of atmospheric pollution.Extensive static tests validate the system’s real-time detection capabilities,including the measurement of concentration-path-length product(CL),front distance,and path wind speed of air pollution plumes over long distances exceeding 4 km.Flight experiments is conducted with the helicopter.Scanning of the pollutant concentration and the wind field is carried out in an approximately 1 km slant range over scanning angle ranges from 45°to 65°,with a radial resolution of 30 m and10 s.The test results demonstrate the system’s ability to spatially map atmospheric pollution plumes and predict their motion and dispersion patterns,thereby ensuring the protection of public safety.

Quantifying glacier surging and associated lake dynamics in Amu Darya river basin using UAV and remote sensing data

Glaciers in the Pamir region are experiencing rapid melting and receding due to climate change,which has a significant implication for the Amu Darya river basin.Predominantly,surging glaciers,which undergo unpredictable advances,are potentially leading to the obstruction of high-altitude river channels and also glacial lake outburst floods.decrease of-703.5±30.0 m.There is a substantial increase in the number(from 19 to 75)and area(from 4889.7±0.6 m2 to 15345.5±0.6 m2)of RGS lakes along with supra-glacier ponds based on a comparison of ArcGIS base map in 2011 and high-resolution UAV data in 2023.For M glacier,number of lakes increased from 4 to 22 but the lake area declined from 10715.2±0.6 to 365.6±0.6 m2.It was noted that the largest lake in 2011 with an area of 10406.4±0.6 m2 at the southeastern portion of the glacier was not observed in 2023 due to outburst.Both the glaciers have substantially impacted the river flow(Abdukahor river)by obstructing a significant proportion of river channel in recent years and might cause outburst floods.These findings enhance the understanding of glacier dynamics and their impacts on the surrounding areas,emphasizing the urgent need for continued monitoring and appropriate management strategies,with a specific focus on surging glaciers and the associated risks.

Using ontology and rules to retrieve the semantics of disaster remote sensing data

Remote sensing data plays an important role in natural disaster management.However,with the increase of the variety and quantity of remote sensors,the problem of“knowledge barriers”arises when data users in disaster field retrieve remote sensing data.To improve this problem,this paper proposes an ontology and rule based retrieval(ORR)method to retrieve disaster remote sensing data,and this method introduces ontology technology to express earthquake disaster and remote sensing knowledge,on this basis,and realizes the task suitability reasoning of earthquake disaster remote sensing data,mining the semantic relationship between remote sensing metadata and disasters.The prototype system is built according to the ORR method,which is compared with the traditional method,using the ORR method to retrieve disaster remote sensing data can reduce the knowledge requirements of data users in the retrieval process and improve data retrieval efficiency.

ConvNeXt-UperNet-Based Deep Learning Model for Road Extraction from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

When existing deep learning models are used for road extraction tasks from high-resolution images,they are easily affected by noise factors such as tree and building occlusion and complex backgrounds,resulting in incomplete road extraction and low accuracy.We propose the introduction of spatial and channel attention modules to the convolutional neural network ConvNeXt.Then,ConvNeXt is used as the backbone network,which cooperates with the perceptual analysis network UPerNet,retains the detection head of the semantic segmentation,and builds a new model ConvNeXt-UPerNet to suppress noise interference.Training on the open-source DeepGlobe and CHN6-CUG datasets and introducing the DiceLoss on the basis of CrossEntropyLoss solves the problem of positive and negative sample imbalance.Experimental results show that the new network model can achieve the following performance on the DeepGlobe dataset:79.40%for precision(Pre),97.93% for accuracy(Acc),69.28% for intersection over union(IoU),and 83.56% for mean intersection over union(MIoU).On the CHN6-CUG dataset,the model achieves the respective values of 78.17%for Pre,97.63%for Acc,65.4% for IoU,and 81.46% for MIoU.Compared with other network models,the fused ConvNeXt-UPerNet model can extract road information better when faced with the influence of noise contained in high-resolution remote sensing images.It also achieves multiscale image feature information with unified perception,ultimately improving the generalization ability of deep learning technology in extracting complex roads from high-resolution remote sensing images.

Mapping the bathymetry of shallow coastal water using singleframe fine-resolution optical remote sensing imagery

This paper presents a bathymetry inversion method using single-frame fine-resolution optical remote sensing imagery based on ocean-wave refraction and shallow-water wave theory. First, the relationship among water depth, wavelength and wave radian frequency in shallow water was deduced based on shallow-water wave theory. Considering the complex wave distribution in the optical remote sensing imagery, Fast Fourier Transform （FFT） and spatial profile measurements were applied for measuring the wavelengths. Then, the wave radian frequency was calculated by analyzing the long-distance fluctuation in the wavelength, which solved a key problem in obtaining the wave radian frequency in a single-frame image. A case study was conducted for Sanya Bay of Hainan Island, China. Single-flame fine-resolution optical remote sensing imagery from QuickBird satellite was used to invert the bathymetry without external input parameters. The result of the digital elevation model （DEM） was evaluated against a sea chart with a scale of 1：25 000. The root-mean-square error of the inverted bathymetry was 1.07 m, and the relative error was 16.2%. Therefore, the proposed method has the advantages including no requirement for true depths and environmental parameters, and is feasible for mapping the bathymetry of shallow coastal water.

Algorithmic Foundation and Software Tools for Extracting Shoreline Features from Remote Sensing Imagery and LiDAR Data

This paper presents algorithmic components and corresponding software routines for extracting shoreline features from remote sensing imagery and LiDAR data. Conceptually, shoreline features are treated as boundary lines between land objects and water objects. Numerical algorithms have been identified and de-vised to segment and classify remote sensing imagery and LiDAR data into land and water pixels, to form and enhance land and water objects, and to trace and vectorize the boundaries between land and water ob-jects as shoreline features. A contouring routine is developed as an alternative method for extracting shore-line features from LiDAR data. While most of numerical algorithms are implemented using C++ program-ming language, some algorithms use available functions of ArcObjects in ArcGIS. Based on VB .NET and ArcObjects programming, a graphical user’s interface has been developed to integrate and organize shoreline extraction routines into a software package. This product represents the first comprehensive software tool dedicated for extracting shorelines from remotely sensed data. Radarsat SAR image, QuickBird multispectral image, and airborne LiDAR data have been used to demonstrate how these software routines can be utilized and combined to extract shoreline features from different types of input data sources: panchromatic or single band imagery, color or multi-spectral image, and LiDAR elevation data. Our software package is freely available for the public through the internet.

A spatial geostatistical analysis of impact of land use development on groundwater resources in the Sangong Oasis Region using remote sensing imagery and data

In this study, the relationship between land use and cover change (LUCC) and variation of groundwater level and quality in the Sangong Oasis Region was investigated using a spatial geostatistical approach. Specifically, interactions among groundwater, surface water, and LUCC were analyzed through the utilization of geographical information system (GIS), remote sensing (RS) Imagery processing, and geostatistics. Study outputs indicated that recharging into the groundwater did not change significantly during the period from 1978 to 1998. However, both LUCC and groundwater level changed substantially in the Sangong Oasis Region, and their variations were closely correlated to each other spatially and temporally over the past two decades. It confirmed that urbanization process and increased industrial activities were the direct reasons of groundwater table descending and the deterioration of water quality. The results of this research provided a scientific basis for understanding sustainability-related problems and solution options in the oasis areas of western China.

CrossFormer Embedding DeepLabv3+ for Remote Sensing Images Semantic Segmentation

High-resolution remote sensing image segmentation is a challenging task. In urban remote sensing, the presenceof occlusions and shadows often results in blurred or invisible object boundaries, thereby increasing the difficultyof segmentation. In this paper, an improved network with a cross-region self-attention mechanism for multi-scalefeatures based onDeepLabv3+is designed to address the difficulties of small object segmentation and blurred targetedge segmentation. First,we use CrossFormer as the backbone feature extraction network to achieve the interactionbetween large- and small-scale features, and establish self-attention associations between features at both large andsmall scales to capture global contextual feature information. Next, an improved atrous spatial pyramid poolingmodule is introduced to establish multi-scale feature maps with large- and small-scale feature associations, andattention vectors are added in the channel direction to enable adaptive adjustment of multi-scale channel features.The proposed networkmodel is validated using the PotsdamandVaihingen datasets. The experimental results showthat, compared with existing techniques, the network model designed in this paper can extract and fuse multiscaleinformation, more clearly extract edge information and small-scale information, and segment boundariesmore smoothly. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of ourmethod compared withseveral state-of-the-art networks.

Determining the planting year of navel orange trees in mountainous and hilly areas of southern China:a remote sensing based method

Remote sensing has demonstrated validity in determining the planting year of deciduous fruit trees;however,its effectiveness in ascertaining the planting year of evergreen fruit trees remains unverified.Furthermore,the sources of error associated with using remote sensing to determine the planting year of fruit trees remain unclear.This study investigates several cultivated sweet orange(Citrus sinensis)varieties,which are extensively cultivated throughout subtropical China.We analyzed Landsat time series data from 132 navel orange orchards in Gannan,covering the period from 1993 to 2021.For each orchard,Google Earth Engine was employed to extract three vegetation indices—Enhanced Vegetation Index(EVI),Normalized Difference Vegetation Index(NDVI),and Normalized Burn Ratio(NBR)—for each available date,thereby generating three distinct vegetation index time series.The planting year of navel orange trees was identified based on abrupt changes observed in these time series.The principal sources of error in determining the planting year were investigated using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test,Spearman's correlation analysis,and Kruskal-Wallis H test.Key findings include:(1)Following the planting of navel orange trees,EVI,NDVI,and NBR exhibited fluctuations and a gradual increase over time,peaking approximately 10 to 15 years later.(2)The vegetation index time series derived from Landsat imagery effectively determined the planting year of evergreen navel orange trees in orchards,even within highly fragmented landscapes.Among these indices,NDVI and NBR time series outperformed the EVI time series.Specifically,the average determination errors for EVI,NDVI,and NBR time series were 6.4,1.8,and 2.8 years,respectively.(3)Major sources of error included the methods used to construct the time series,the selection of vegetation indices,and the orchard management practices.Overall,this study provides a viable method for determining the planting year of evergreen navel orange trees in fragmented landscapes and offers insights into factors contributing to uncertainty in planting year determination.

Remote sensing of quality traits in cereal and arable production systems:A review

Cereal is an essential source of calories and protein for the global population.Accurately predicting cereal quality before harvest is highly desirable in order to optimise management for farmers,grading harvest and categorised storage for enterprises,future trading prices,and policy planning.The use of remote sensing data with extensive spatial coverage demonstrates some potential in predicting crop quality traits.Many studies have also proposed models and methods for predicting such traits based on multiplatform remote sensing data.In this paper,the key quality traits that are of interest to producers and consumers are introduced.The literature related to grain quality prediction was analyzed in detail,and a review was conducted on remote sensing platforms,commonly used methods,potential gaps,and future trends in crop quality prediction.This review recommends new research directions that go beyond the traditional methods and discusses grain quality retrieval and the associated challenges from the perspective of remote sensing data.

Untethered Micro/Nanorobots for Remote Sensing:Toward Intelligent Platform

Untethered micro/nanorobots that can wirelessly control their motion and deformation state have gained enormous interest in remote sensing applications due to their unique motion characteristics in various media and diverse functionalities.Researchers are developing micro/nanorobots as innovative tools to improve sensing performance and miniaturize sensing systems,enabling in situ detection of substances that traditional sensing methods struggle to achieve.Over the past decade of development,significant research progress has been made in designing sensing strategies based on micro/nanorobots,employing various coordinated control and sensing approaches.This review summarizes the latest developments on micro/nanorobots for remote sensing applications by utilizing the self-generated signals of the robots,robot behavior,microrobotic manipulation,and robot-environment interactions.Providing recent studies and relevant applications in remote sensing,we also discuss the challenges and future perspectives facing micro/nanorobots-based intelligent sensing platforms to achieve sensing in complex environments,translating lab research achievements into widespread real applications.

Advancements in Remote Sensing Image Dehazing: Introducing URA-Net with Multi-Scale Dense Feature Fusion Clusters and Gated Jump Connection

The degradation of optical remote sensing images due to atmospheric haze poses a significant obstacle,profoundly impeding their effective utilization across various domains.Dehazing methodologies have emerged as pivotal components of image preprocessing,fostering an improvement in the quality of remote sensing imagery.This enhancement renders remote sensing data more indispensable,thereby enhancing the accuracy of target iden-tification.Conventional defogging techniques based on simplistic atmospheric degradation models have proven inadequate for mitigating non-uniform haze within remotely sensed images.In response to this challenge,a novel UNet Residual Attention Network(URA-Net)is proposed.This paradigmatic approach materializes as an end-to-end convolutional neural network distinguished by its utilization of multi-scale dense feature fusion clusters and gated jump connections.The essence of our methodology lies in local feature fusion within dense residual clusters,enabling the extraction of pertinent features from both preceding and current local data,depending on contextual demands.The intelligently orchestrated gated structures facilitate the propagation of these features to the decoder,resulting in superior outcomes in haze removal.Empirical validation through a plethora of experiments substantiates the efficacy of URA-Net,demonstrating its superior performance compared to existing methods when applied to established datasets for remote sensing image defogging.On the RICE-1 dataset,URA-Net achieves a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR)of 29.07 dB,surpassing the Dark Channel Prior(DCP)by 11.17 dB,the All-in-One Network for Dehazing(AOD)by 7.82 dB,the Optimal Transmission Map and Adaptive Atmospheric Light For Dehazing(OTM-AAL)by 5.37 dB,the Unsupervised Single Image Dehazing(USID)by 8.0 dB,and the Superpixel-based Remote Sensing Image Dehazing(SRD)by 8.5 dB.Particularly noteworthy,on the SateHaze1k dataset,URA-Net attains preeminence in overall performance,yielding defogged images characterized by consistent visual quality.This underscores the contribution of the research to the advancement of remote sensing technology,providing a robust and efficient solution for alleviating the adverse effects of haze on image quality.

Feature extraction and analysis of reclaimed vegetation in ecological restoration area of abandoned mines based on hyperspectral remote sensing images

The vegetation growth status largely represents the ecosystem function and environmental quality.Hyperspectral remote sensing data can effectively eliminate the effects of surface spectral reflectance and atmospheric scattering and directly reflect the vegetation parameter information.In this study,the abandoned mining area in the Helan Mountains,China was taken as the study area.Based on hyperspectral remote sensing images of Zhuhai No.1 hyperspectral satellite,we used the pixel dichotomy model,which was constructed using the normalized difference vegetation index(NDVI),to estimate the vegetation coverage of the study area,and evaluated the vegetation growth status by five vegetation indices(NDVI,ratio vegetation index(RVI),photochemical vegetation index(PVI),red-green ratio index(RGI),and anthocyanin reflectance index 1(ARI1)).According to the results,the reclaimed vegetation growth status in the study area can be divided into four levels(unhealthy,low healthy,healthy,and very healthy).The overall vegetation growth status in the study area was generally at low healthy level,indicating that the vegetation growth status in the study area was not good due to short-time period restoration and harsh damaged environment such as high and steep rock slopes.Furthermore,the unhealthy areas were mainly located in Dawukougou where abandoned mines were concentrated,indicating that the original mining activities have had a large effect on vegetation ecology.After ecological restoration of abandoned mines,the vegetation coverage in the study area has increased to a certain extent,but the amplitude was not large.The situation of vegetation coverage in the northern part of the study area was worse than that in the southern part,due to abandoned mines mainly concentrating in the northern part of the Helan Mountains.The combination of hyperspectral remote sensing data and vegetation indices can comprehensively extract the characteristics of vegetation,accurately analyze the plant growth status,and provide technical support for vegetation health evaluation.

Modeling urban redevelopment:A novel approach using time-series remote sensing data and machine learning

Accurate mapping and timely monitoring of urban redevelopment are pivotal for urban studies and decisionmakers to foster sustainable urban development.Traditional mapping methods heavily depend on field surveys and subjective questionnaires,yielding less objective,reliable,and timely data.Recent advancements in Geographic Information Systems(GIS)and remote-sensing technologies have improved the identification and mapping of urban redevelopment through quantitative analysis using satellite-based observations.Nonetheless,challenges persist,particularly concerning accuracy and significant temporal delays.This study introduces a novel approach to modeling urban redevelopment,leveraging machine learning algorithms and remote-sensing data.This methodology can facilitate the accurate and timely identification of urban redevelopment activities.The study’s machine learning model can analyze time-series remote-sensing data to identify spatio-temporal and spectral patterns related to urban redevelopment.The model is thoroughly evaluated,and the results indicate that it can accurately capture the time-series patterns of urban redevelopment.This research’s findings are useful for evaluating urban demographic and economic changes,informing policymaking and urban planning,and contributing to sustainable urban development.The model can also serve as a foundation for future research on early-stage urban redevelopment detection and evaluation of the causes and impacts of urban redevelopment.

Probability-Enhanced Anchor-Free Detector for Remote-Sensing Object Detection

Anchor-free object-detection methods achieve a significant advancement in field of computer vision,particularly in the realm of real-time inferences.However,in remote sensing object detection,anchor-free methods often lack of capability in separating the foreground and background.This paper proposes an anchor-free method named probability-enhanced anchor-free detector(ProEnDet)for remote sensing object detection.First,a weighted bidirectional feature pyramid is used for feature extraction.Second,we introduce probability enhancement to strengthen the classification of the object’s foreground and background.The detector uses the logarithm likelihood as the final score to improve the classification of the foreground and background of the object.ProEnDet is verified using the DIOR and NWPU-VHR-10 datasets.The experiment achieved mean average precisions of 61.4 and 69.0 on the DIOR dataset and NWPU-VHR-10 dataset,respectively.ProEnDet achieves a speed of 32.4 FPS on the DIOR dataset,which satisfies the real-time requirements for remote-sensing object detection.

Weakly Supervised Network with Scribble-Supervised and Edge-Mask for Road Extraction from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Significant advancements have been achieved in road surface extraction based on high-resolution remote sensingimage processing. Most current methods rely on fully supervised learning, which necessitates enormous humaneffort to label the image. Within this field, other research endeavors utilize weakly supervised methods. Theseapproaches aim to reduce the expenses associated with annotation by leveraging sparsely annotated data, such asscribbles. This paper presents a novel technique called a weakly supervised network using scribble-supervised andedge-mask (WSSE-net). This network is a three-branch network architecture, whereby each branch is equippedwith a distinct decoder module dedicated to road extraction tasks. One of the branches is dedicated to generatingedge masks using edge detection algorithms and optimizing road edge details. The other two branches supervise themodel’s training by employing scribble labels and spreading scribble information throughout the image. To addressthe historical flaw that created pseudo-labels that are not updated with network training, we use mixup to blendprediction results dynamically and continually update new pseudo-labels to steer network training. Our solutiondemonstrates efficient operation by simultaneously considering both edge-mask aid and dynamic pseudo-labelsupport. The studies are conducted on three separate road datasets, which consist primarily of high-resolutionremote-sensing satellite photos and drone images. The experimental findings suggest that our methodologyperforms better than advanced scribble-supervised approaches and specific traditional fully supervised methods.

Object-oriented crop classification based on UAV remote sensing imagery

UAV remote sensing images have the advantages of high spatial resolution,fast speed,strong real-time performance,and convenient operation,etc.,and have become a recently developed,vital means of acquiring surface information.It is an important research task for precision agriculture to make full use of the spectrum,texture,color and other characteristic information of crops,especially the spatial arrangement and structure information of features,to explore effective methods for the classification of multiple varieties of crops.In order to explore the applicability of the object-oriented method to achieve accurate classification of UAV high-resolution images,the paper used the object-oriented classification method in ENVI to classify the UAV high-resolution remote sensing image obtained from the orderly structured 28 species of crops in the test field,which mainly includes image segmentation and object classification.The results showed that the plots obtained after classification were continuous and complete,basically in line with the actual situation,and the overall accuracy of crop classification was 91.73%,with Kappa coefficient of 0.87.Compared with the crop planting area based on remote sensing interpretation and field survey,the area error of 17 species of crops in this study was controlled within 15%,which provides a basis for object-oriented crop classification of UAV remote sensing images.

Estimation and verification of green tide biomass based on UAV remote sensing

Since 2007,the Yellow Sea green tide has broken out every summer,causing great harm to the environment and society.Although satellite remote sensing(RS)has been used in biomass research,there are several shortcomings,such as mixed pixels,atmospheric interference,and difficult field validation.The biomass of green tide has been lacking a high-precision estimation method.In this study,high-resolution unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)RS was used to quantitatively map the biomass of green tides.By utilizing experimental data from previous studies,a robust relationship was established to link biomass to the red-green-blue floating algae index(RGB-FAI).Then,the lab-based model for green tide biomass from visible images taken by the UAV camera was developed and validated by field measurements.Re sults show that the accurate and cost-effective method is able to estimate the green tide biomass and its changes in given local waters of the near and far seas.The study provided an effective complement to the traditional satellite RS,as well as high-precision quantitative techniques for decision-making in disaster management.