Tree species classification in an extensive forest area using airborne hyperspectral data under varying light conditions

Although airborne hyperspectral data with detailed spatial and spectral information has demonstrated significant potential for tree species classification,it has not been widely used over large areas.A comprehensive process based on multi-flightline airborne hyperspectral data is lacking over large,forested areas influenced by both the effects of bidirectional reflectance distribution function(BRDF)and cloud shadow contamination.In this study,hyperspectral data were collected over the Mengjiagang Forest Farm in Northeast China in the summer of 2017 using the Chinese Academy of Forestry's LiDAR,CCD,and hyperspectral systems(CAF-LiCHy).After BRDF correction and cloud shadow detection processing,a tree species classification workflow was developed for sunlit and cloud-shaded forest areas with input features of minimum noise fraction reduced bands,spectral vegetation indices,and texture information.Results indicate that BRDF-corrected sunlit hyperspectral data can provide a stable and high classification accuracy based on representative training data.Cloud-shaded pixels also have good spectral separability for species classification.The red-edge spectral information and ratio-based spectral indices with high importance scores are recommended as input features for species classification under varying light conditions.According to the classification accuracies through field survey data at multiple spatial scales,it was found that species classification within an extensive forest area using airborne hyperspectral data under various illuminations can be successfully carried out using the effective radiometric consistency process and feature selection strategy.

Determination of Curie Point Depth and Heat Flow Using Airborne Magnetic Data over the Kom-Ombo and Nuqra Basins, Southern Eastern Desert, Egypt

The Kom-Ombo and Nuqra basins in southern Egypt have recently been discovered as potential hydrocarbon basins. The lack of information about the geothermal gradient and heat flow in the study area gives importance to studying the heat flow and the geothermal gradient. Several studies were carried out to investigate the geothermal analyses of the northwestern desert, as well as the west and east of the Nile River, using density, compressive wave velocity, and bottom hole temperature (BHT) measured from deep oil wells. This research relies on spectral analysis of airborne magnetic survey data in the Kom-Ombo and Nuqra basins in order to estimate the geothermal gradient based on calculating the depth to the bottom of the magnetic source that caused the occurrence of these magnetic deviations. This depth is equal to the CPD, at which the material loses its magnetic polarisation. This method is fast and gives satisfactory results. Usually, it can be applied as a reconnaissance technique for geothermal exploration targets due to the abundance of magnetic data. The depth of the top (Zt) and centroid (Z0) of the magnetic source bodies was calculated for the 32 windows representing the study area using spectral analysis of airborne magnetic data. The curie-isotherm depth, geothermal gradient, and heat flow maps were constructed for the study area. The results showed that the CPD in the study area ranges from 13 km to 20 km. The heat flow map values range from 69 to 109 mW/m2, with an average of about 80 mW/m2. The calculated heat flow values in the assigned areas (A, B, C, and D) of the study area are considered to have high heat flow values, reaching 109 mW/m2. On the other hand, the heat flow values in the other parts range from 70 to 85 mW/m2. Since heat flow plays an essential role in the maturation of organic matter, it is recommended that hydrocarbon accumulations be located in places with high heat flow values, while deep drilling of hydrocarbon wells is recommended in places with low to moderate heat flow values.

Progress of Geological Survey Using Airborne Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Data in the Gansu and Qinghai Regions

Hyperspectral remote sensing is now a frontier of the remote sensing technology. Airborne hyperspectral remote sensing data have hundreds of narrow bands to obtain complete and continuous ground-object spectra. Therefore, they can be effectively used to identify these grotmd objects which are difficult to discriminate by using wide-band data, and show much promise in geological survey. At the height of 1500 m, have 36 bands in visible to the CASI hyperspectral data near-infrared spectral range, with a spectral resolution of 19 nm and a space resolution of 0.9 m. The SASI data have 101 bands in the shortwave infrared spectral range, with a spectral resolution of 15 nm and a space resolution of 2.25 m. In 2010, China Geological Survey deployed an airborne CASI/SASI hyperspectral measurement project, and selected the Liuyuan and Fangshankou areas in the Beishan metallogenic belt of Gansu Province, and the Nachitai area of East Kunlun metallogenic belt in Qinghai Province to conduct geological survey. The work period of this project was three years.

DESIGN OF AN AIRBORNE OPTIC FIBER DATA BUS SYSTEM

The development,application,communication protocol and system structure of anairborne data bus system are discussed in this paper with emphasis on the design of hardware,software and optical fiber transmission system of the bus controller and remote terminal.Some experiments and their results are also given in this paper.

A Hierarchical unsupervised method for power line classification from airborne LiDAR data

The automatic classification of power lines from airborne light detection and ranging(LiDAR)data is a crucial task for power supply management.The methods for power line classification can be either supervised or unsupervised.Supervised methods might achieve high accuracy for small areas,but it is time consuming to collect training data over areas of different conditions and complexity.Therefore,unsupervised methods that can automatically work over different areas without sophisticated parameter tuning are in great demand.In this paper,we presented a hierarchical unsupervised LiDAR-based power line classification method that first screened the power line candidate points(including the power line corridor direction detection based on a layered Hough transform,connectivity analysis,and Douglas–Peucker simplification algorithm),followed by the extraction of contextual linear and angular features for each candidate laser points,and finally by setting the feature threshold values to identify the power line points.We tested the method over both forest and urban areas and found that the precision,recall and quality rates were up to 96.7%,88.8%and 78.3%,respectively,for the test datasets and were higher than the ones from a previously developed supervised classification method.Overall,our approach has the advantages of achieving relatively high accuracy and being relatively fast.

ETH-GQS: An estimation of geoid-to-quasigeoid separation over Ethiopia

The determination of accurate orthometric or normal heights remains one of the main challenges for the geodetic community in Ethiopia.These heights are required for geodetic and geodynamic scientific research as well as for extensive engineering applications.The main objective of this study is to estimate the geoid-to-quasi geoid separation(GQS)in Ethiopia(ETH-GQS).Such separation would be required for the conversion between geoid and quasigeoid models,which is mandatory for the determination of accurate geodetic heights in mountain regions.The airborne free-air gravity anomalies and the topo-graphic information retrieved from the SRTM3(Shuttle Radar Topography Mission of a spatial resolution 3 arc-second)digital elevation model were used to compute the ETH-GQS model according to the Sjoberg's strict formula for the geoid-to-quasigeoid separation.The ETH-GQS was then validated using GNSS-levelling data as well as geoid heights determined from different Global Geopotential Models(GGMs),namely the EGM2008,EIGEN-6C4 and GECO.The results reveal that the standard deviation of differences between the geoid heights obtained from the EIGEN-6C4 model and the geometric geoid heights obtained from GNSS-levelling data were improved by~75%(i.e.from~24 to~6 cm)when considering GQS values obtained from the ETH-GQS.