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Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing
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Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing

A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Remote Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2022) | Viewed by 35520

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Chunxiang Cao

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Interests: diagnosis of environmental health by remote sensing
Dr. Min Xu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Interests: public health research based on spatial information technology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Remote sensing provides new modes and high-tech means for diagnosing environmental health and makes it possible for the rapid diagnosis of the health status of key ecological areas. With the help of remote sensing technology, large-scale, multi-temporal, high-accuracy environmental diagnostic parameters such as vegetation, water, soil and air quality parameters can be acquired, the main factors affecting environmental health can be identified, and the environmental health statuses of key ecological areas can be rapidly diagnosed. It can provide scientific and technological support such as monitoring, early warning, assessment and emergency rescue for the effective prevention of a variety of ecological and environment damages, the reduction of the impact of natural disasters and the protection of human health.

This Special Issue aims at studies covering key technologies, index systems, and typical applications for environmental health diagnosis based on remote sensing. The topics may cover anything including forest health, grassland health, wetland health, farmland health, atmospheric health, and environment-related diseases, etc. The articles may address, but are not limited, to the following topics:

  • Forest health diagnosis;
  • Grassland health diagnosis;
  • Wetland health diagnosis;
  • Farmland health diagnosis;
  • Atmospheric health diagnosis;
  • Urban health diagnosis;
  • Environment-related disease diagnosis;
  • Index systems for environmental health;
  • The impact of human activities on health.

Prof. Dr. Chunxiang Cao
Dr. Min Xu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • environmental health
  • ecological health
  • diagnosis by remote sensing
  • environmental parameters
  • index system for environmental health
  • environmental impact factors
  • spatio-temporal variation

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Published Papers (11 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 7401 KiB  
Article
Multisource Remote Sensing Data-Based Flood Monitoring and Crop Damage Assessment: A Case Study on the 20 July 2021 Extraordinary Rainfall Event in Henan, China
by Minghui Zhang, Di Liu, Siyuan Wang, Haibing Xiang and Wenxiu Zhang
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(22), 5771; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14225771 - 15 Nov 2022
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3480
Abstract
On 20 July 2021, an extraordinary rainfall event occurred in Henan Province, China, resulting in heavy waterlogging, flooding, and hundreds of fatalities and causing considerable property damage. Because the damaged region was a major grain-producing region of China, assessing crop food production losses [...] Read more.
On 20 July 2021, an extraordinary rainfall event occurred in Henan Province, China, resulting in heavy waterlogging, flooding, and hundreds of fatalities and causing considerable property damage. Because the damaged region was a major grain-producing region of China, assessing crop food production losses following this event is very important. Because the crop rotation production system is utilized in the region to accommodate two crops per year, it is very valuable to accurately identify the types of crops affected by the event and to assess the crop production losses separately; however, the results obtained using these methods are still inadequate. In this study, we used China’s first commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data source, named Hisea-1, together with other open-source and widely used remote sensing data (Sentinel-1 and Sentinel 2), to monitor this catastrophic flood. Both the modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI) and Sentinel-1 dual-polarized water index (SDWI) were calculated, and an unsupervised classification (k-means) method was adopted for rapid water body extraction. Based on time-series datasets synthesized from multiple sources, we obtained four flooding characteristics, including the flooded area, flood duration, and start and end times of flooding. Then, according to these characteristics, we conducted a more precise analysis of the damages to flooded farmlands. We used the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform to obtain normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time-series data for the disaster year and normal years and overlaid the flooded areas to extract the effects of flooding on crop species. According to the statistics from previous years, we calculated the areas and types of damaged crops and the yield reduction amounts. Our results showed that (1) the study area endured two floods in July and September of 2021; (2) the maximum areas affected by these two flooding events were 380.2 km2 and 215.6 km2, respectively; (3) the floods significantly affected winter wheat and summer grain (maize or soybean), affecting areas of 106.4 km2 and 263.3 km2, respectively; and (4) the crop production reductions in the affected area were 18,708 t for winter wheat and 160,000 t for maize or soybean. These findings indicate that the temporal-dimension information, as opposed to the traditional use of the affected area and the yield per unit area when estimating food losses, is very important for accurately estimating damaged crop types and yield reductions. Time-series remote sensing data, especially SAR remote sensing data, which have the advantage of penetrating clouds and rain, play an important role in remotely sensed disaster monitoring. Hisea-1 data, with a high spatial resolution and first flood-monitoring capabilities, show their value in this study and have the potential for increased usage in further studies, such as urban flooding research. As such, the approach proposed herein is worth expanding to other applications, such as studies of water resource management and lake/wetland hydrological changes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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19 pages, 4304 KiB  
Article
Analysis of the Spatial and Temporal Evolution Patterns of Grassland Health and Its Driving Factors in Xilingol
by Kaimin Wang, Chunxiang Cao, Bo Xie, Min Xu, Xinwei Yang, Heyi Guo and Robert Shea Duerler
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(20), 5179; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14205179 - 17 Oct 2022
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 1706
Abstract
The combination of natural environment changes and human activities affects the growth of grasslands. In order to quantitatively assess the causes of spatial and temporal variation of grasslands in Xilingol, this study assessed the spatial and temporal evolution patterns of grassland health based [...] Read more.
The combination of natural environment changes and human activities affects the growth of grasslands. In order to quantitatively assess the causes of spatial and temporal variation of grasslands in Xilingol, this study assessed the spatial and temporal evolution patterns of grassland health based on MOD13A1 long time series Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data from 2000–2019 using trend analysis. The geodetector model was used to explore the dominant drivers of spatial variation in grassland NDVI, combined with 34 factors covering natural environmental changes and human disturbances over the same period. The results show that the grasslands of Xilingol showed an overall recovery trend from 2000 to 2019, with an average annual NDVI growth rate of 0.0028/a, a monthly increasing rate of 0.0005/month, and 68.06% of the grassland at an average recovery level. Moisture-dominated natural climate change factors, such as Growing Season Precipitation (Prep2), Annual Mean Water Vapor Pressure (WVP), and Annual Mean Relative Humidity (RH), were the underlying cause of grassland health changes during the study period, with the highest explanatory factor being growing season precipitation (q value of 0.59 on a multi-year average). The influence of primary production value among human activities was greater, and the explanatory factor of tertiary production value showed an increasing trend. The interactions among natural and anthropogenic factors significantly enhances their explanatory credibility for NDVI, with the type of interaction dominated by the two-factor enhancement. Risk detection of the top 10 dominant drivers in terms of q statistic were carried out to obtain the threshold range of each driver in the high zone of grassland NDVI, which can provide a scientific reference for the sustainable restoration of grassland. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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16 pages, 6091 KiB  
Article
Spatio-Temporal Changes in Vegetation in the Last Two Decades (2001–2020) in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Region
by Yuan Zou, Wei Chen, Siliang Li, Tiejun Wang, Le Yu, Min Xu, Ramesh P. Singh and Cong-Qiang Liu
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(16), 3958; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14163958 - 15 Aug 2022
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2584
Abstract
In terrestrial ecosystems, vegetation is sensitive to climate change and human activities. Its spatial-temporal changes also affect the ecological and social environment. In this paper, we considered the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region to study the spatio-temporal vegetation patterns. The detailed analysis of a moderate-resolution imaging [...] Read more.
In terrestrial ecosystems, vegetation is sensitive to climate change and human activities. Its spatial-temporal changes also affect the ecological and social environment. In this paper, we considered the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region to study the spatio-temporal vegetation patterns. The detailed analysis of a moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) data were carried out through the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. Our results show a slow and tortuous upward trend in the average leaf area index (LAI) in the study region for the periods 2001–2020. Specifically, Beijing had the highest LAI value, with an average of 1.64 over twenty years, followed by Hebei (1.30) and Tianjin (1.04). Among different vegetation types, forests had the highest normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) with the range of 0.62–0.78, followed by shrubland (0.58–0.75), grassland (0.34–0.66), and cropland (0.38–0.54) over the years. Spatially, compared to the whole study area, index value in the northwestern part of the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region increased greatly in many areas, such as northwest Beijing, Chengde, and Zhangjiakou, indicating a significant ecological optimization. Meanwhile, there was ecological degradation in the middle and southeast regions, from Tangshan southeastward to Handan, crossing Tianjin, Langfang, the east part of Baoding, Shijiazhuang, and the west part of Cangzhou. Air temperature and precipitation were positively and significantly correlated with net primary production (NPP) and precipitation stood out as a key driver. Additionally, an intensification of the urbanization rate will negatively impact the vegetation NPP, with the shrubland and forest being affected most relative to the cropland. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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21 pages, 8724 KiB  
Article
Soil Moisture Retrieval Using SAR Backscattering Ratio Method during the Crop Growing Season
by Minfeng Xing, Lin Chen, Jinfei Wang, Jiali Shang and Xiaodong Huang
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(13), 3210; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14133210 - 4 Jul 2022
Cited by 21 | Viewed by 4510
Abstract
Soil moisture content (SMC) is an indispensable basic element for crop growth and development in agricultural production. Obtaining accurate information on SMC in real time over large agricultural areas has important guiding significance for crop yield estimation and production management. In this study, [...] Read more.
Soil moisture content (SMC) is an indispensable basic element for crop growth and development in agricultural production. Obtaining accurate information on SMC in real time over large agricultural areas has important guiding significance for crop yield estimation and production management. In this study, the paper reports on the retrieval of SMC from RADARSAT-2 polarimetric SAR data. The proposed SMC retrieval algorithm includes vegetation correction based on a ratio method and roughness correction based on the optimal roughness method. Three vegetation description parameters (i.e., RVI, LAI, and NDVI) serve as vegetation descriptors in the parameterization of the algorithm. To testify the vegetation correction result of the algorithm, the water cloud model (WCM) was compared with the algorithm. The calibrated integrated equation model (CIEM) was employed to describe the backscattering from the underlying soil. To improve the accuracy of SMC retrieval, the CIEM model was optimized by using the optimal roughness parameter and the normalization method of reference incidence angle. Validation against ground measurements showed a high correlation between the measured and estimated SMC when the NDVI serves as vegetation descriptor (R2 = 0.68, RMSE = 4.15 vol.%, p < 0.01). The overall estimation performance of the proposed SMC retrieval algorithm is better than that of the WCM. It demonstrates that the proposed algorithm has an operational potential to estimate SMC over wheat fields during the growing season. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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16 pages, 4410 KiB  
Article
Monitoring Ecological Conditions by Remote Sensing and Social Media Data—Sanya City (China) as Case Study
by Tengfei Yang, Jibo Xie, Peilin Song, Guoqing Li, Naixia Mou, Xinyue Gao and Jing Zhao
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(12), 2824; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14122824 - 12 Jun 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2341
Abstract
The ecological environment is the basis of human survival and development. Effective methods to monitor the ecological environment are essential for the healthy development of human settlements. At present, methods based on remote sensing images and other basic data have played key roles [...] Read more.
The ecological environment is the basis of human survival and development. Effective methods to monitor the ecological environment are essential for the healthy development of human settlements. At present, methods based on remote sensing images and other basic data have played key roles in ecological environment monitoring, providing support for decision-making on local ecological environment protection. However, these data and methods have obvious limitations. On the one hand, they cannot reflect the feelings of human beings about the ecological environment in which they live. On the other hand, it is difficult to capture more detailed information about the ecological environment. Non-professional observation data represented by social media describe the ecological environment from the perspective of the public, which can be a powerful supplement to traditional data. However, these different data sources have their own characteristics and forms, and it is difficult to achieve efficient integration. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a framework that comprehensively considers social media, remote sensing, and other data to monitor the ecological environment of a study area. First, the framework extracted the ecological environment-related information contained in social media data, including public sentiment information and topic keyword information, by integrating algorithms such as natural language processing and machine learning. Then, we constructed a social semantic network related to the ecological environment based on the extracted information. We used a remote sensing image and other basic data to analyze the ecological sensitivity in the study area. Finally, based on the keyword with spatial location attribute contained in the social semantic network, we established the link between the constructed network and the results of ecological sensitivity analysis to comprehensively analyze the ecological environment in the study area. The comprehensive analysis results not only reflect the distribution of ecological vulnerability in the study area, but also help identify specific areas worthy of attention and the ecological problems faced by these areas. We used the city of Sanya in China as a case study to verify the effectiveness of the method in this paper. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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17 pages, 6237 KiB  
Article
Development and Evaluation of a Real-Time Hourly One-Kilometre Gridded Multisource Fusion Air Temperature Dataset in China Based on Remote Sensing DEM
by Shuai Han, Chunxiang Shi, Shuai Sun, Junxia Gu, Bin Xu, Zhihong Liao, Yu Zhang and Yanqin Xu
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(10), 2480; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14102480 - 22 May 2022
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2218
Abstract
High-resolution gridded 2 m air temperature datasets are important input data for global and regional climate change studies, agrohydrologic model simulations and numerical weather predictions, etc. In this study, the digital elevation model (DEM) is used to correct temperature forecasts produced by ECMWF. [...] Read more.
High-resolution gridded 2 m air temperature datasets are important input data for global and regional climate change studies, agrohydrologic model simulations and numerical weather predictions, etc. In this study, the digital elevation model (DEM) is used to correct temperature forecasts produced by ECMWF. The multi-grid variation formulation method is then used to fuse the data from corrected temperature forecasts and ground automatic station observations. The fused dataset covers the area over (0–60°N, 70–140°S), where different underlying surfaces exist, such as plains, basins, plateaus, and mountains. The spatial and temporal resolutions are 1 km and 1 h, respectively. The comparison of the fusion data with the verification observations, including 2400 weather stations, indicates that the accuracy of the gridded temperature is superior to European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) data. This is because a more significant number of stations and high-resolution terrain data are used to generate the fusion data than are utilized in the ECMWF. The obtained dataset can describe the temperature feature of peaks and valleys more precisely. Due to its continuous temporal coverage and consistent quality, the fusion dataset is one of China’s most widely used temperature datasets. However, data uncertainty will increase for areas with sparse observations and high mountains, and we must be cautious when using data from these areas. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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23 pages, 6795 KiB  
Article
Estimating Soil Moisture over Winter Wheat Fields during Growing Season Using RADARSAT-2 Data
by Lin Chen, Minfeng Xing, Binbin He, Jinfei Wang, Min Xu, Yang Song and Xiaodong Huang
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(9), 2232; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14092232 - 6 May 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2676
Abstract
Soil moisture content (SMC) is a significant factor affecting crop growth and development. However, SMC estimation, based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is influenced by a variety of surface parameters, such as vegetation cover and surface roughness. As a result, determining the SMC [...] Read more.
Soil moisture content (SMC) is a significant factor affecting crop growth and development. However, SMC estimation, based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is influenced by a variety of surface parameters, such as vegetation cover and surface roughness. As a result, determining the SMC across agricultural areas (e.g., wheat fields) remotely (i.e., without ground measurement) is difficult to achieve. In this study, a model-based polarization decomposition method was used to decompose the original SAR signal into different scattering components that represented different scattering mechanisms. The different volume scattering models were applied, and then the results were compared in order to remove the scattering contribution from vegetation canopy, and extract the surface scattering components related to the soil moisture. Finally, by combining extensively used surface scattering models (e.g., CIEM and Dubois), and a method of roughness parameters optimization, a lookup table was developed to estimate the soil moisture during the wheat growth period. When CIEM is applied, the R2 and RMSE of the SMC are 0.534, 5.62 vol.%, and for the Dubois model, 0.634, 5.16 vol.%, respectively, which indicates that this approach provides good estimation performance for measuring soil moisture during the wheat growing season. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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15 pages, 8372 KiB  
Article
Improved Forest Canopy Closure Estimation Using Multispectral Satellite Imagery within Google Earth Engine
by Bo Xie, Chunxiang Cao, Min Xu, Xinwei Yang, Robert Shea Duerler, Barjeece Bashir, Zhibin Huang, Kaimin Wang, Yiyu Chen and Heyi Guo
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(9), 2051; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14092051 - 25 Apr 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2817
Abstract
The large area estimation of forest canopy closure (FCC) using remotely sensed data is of high interest in monitoring forest changes and forest health, as well as in assessing forest ecological services. The accurate estimation of FCC over the regional or global scale [...] Read more.
The large area estimation of forest canopy closure (FCC) using remotely sensed data is of high interest in monitoring forest changes and forest health, as well as in assessing forest ecological services. The accurate estimation of FCC over the regional or global scale is challenging due to the difficulty of sample acquisition and the slow processing efficiency of large amounts of remote sensing data. To address this issue, we developed a novel bounding envelope methodology based on vegetation indices (BEVIs) for determining vegetation and bare soil endmembers using the normalized differences vegetation index (NDVI), modified bare soil index (MBSI), and bare soil index (BSI) derived from Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel-2 image within the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, then combined the NDVI with the dimidiate pixel model (DPM), one of the most commonly used spectral-based unmixing methods, to map the FCC distribution over an area of more than 90,000 km2. The key processing was the determination of the threshold parameter in BEVIs that characterizes the spectral boundary of vegetation and soil endmembers. The results demonstrated that when the threshold equals 0.1, the extraction accuracy of vegetation and bare soil endmembers is the highest with the threshold range given as (0, 0.3), and the estimated spatial distribution of FCC using both Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 images were consistent, that is, the area with high canopy density was mainly distributed in the western mountainous region of Chifeng city. The verification was carried out using independent field plots. The proposed approach yielded reliable results when the Landsat 8 data were used (R2 = 0.6, RMSE = 0.13, and 1-rRMSE = 80%), and the accuracy was further improved using Sentinel-2 images with higher spatial resolution (R2 = 0.81, RMSE = 0.09, and 1-rRMSE = 86%). The findings demonstrate that the proposed method is portable among sensors with similar spectral wavebands, and can assist in mapping FCC at a regional scale while using multispectral satellite imagery. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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15 pages, 45753 KiB  
Article
Modelling Impacts of Environmental Water on Vegetation of a Semi-Arid Floodplain–Lakes System Using 30-Year Landsat Data
by Chunying Wu, James Angus Webb and Michael J. Stewardson
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(3), 708; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14030708 - 2 Feb 2022
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 2703
Abstract
River floodplains are among the most dynamic and diverse ecosystems on the planet. They are at risk of degradation due to river regulation and climate change. Environmental water has been delivered to floodplains to maintain environmental health by mimicking natural floods. It is [...] Read more.
River floodplains are among the most dynamic and diverse ecosystems on the planet. They are at risk of degradation due to river regulation and climate change. Environmental water has been delivered to floodplains to maintain environmental health by mimicking natural floods. It is important to understand the long-term effects of environmental water to floodplain vegetation to support its management. This study used Normalized Differences Vegetation index (NDVI) from the 30-year Landsat datasets of the Hattah Lakes floodplain in Australia to investigate the drivers of vegetation dynamics. We developed generalized additive mixed models (GAMM) to model responses of vegetation to environmental water, natural floods, precipitation, temperature, and distance to water across multiple spatial and temporal scales. We found the effect of environmental water on floodplain vegetation to be quite different from that of natural floods in both space and time. Vegetation in most areas of Hattah Lakes will respond to natural floods within one month of flooding, while positive responses to environmental water occur 1 to 3 months after inundation and are more restricted spatially. For environmental water planning, managers need to be aware of these differences. The implementation of new infrastructure to transport or retain environmental water on floodplains needs to be planned carefully, with continuous monitoring of rainfall and natural floods. Whilst environmental floods do not mimic the effect of natural floods, they do provide some positive benefits that can partially offset effects of reduced natural floods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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21 pages, 10614 KiB  
Article
Improved Method to Detect the Tailings Ponds from Multispectral Remote Sensing Images Based on Faster R-CNN and Transfer Learning
by Dongchuan Yan, Hao Zhang, Guoqing Li, Xiangqiang Li, Hua Lei, Kaixuan Lu, Lianchong Zhang and Fuxiao Zhu
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(1), 103; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14010103 - 26 Dec 2021
Cited by 20 | Viewed by 4211
Abstract
The breaching of tailings pond dams may lead to casualties and environmental pollution; therefore, timely and accurate monitoring is an essential aspect of managing such structures and preventing accidents. Remote sensing technology is suitable for the regular extraction and monitoring of tailings pond [...] Read more.
The breaching of tailings pond dams may lead to casualties and environmental pollution; therefore, timely and accurate monitoring is an essential aspect of managing such structures and preventing accidents. Remote sensing technology is suitable for the regular extraction and monitoring of tailings pond information. However, traditional remote sensing is inefficient and unsuitable for the frequent extraction of large volumes of highly precise information. Object detection, based on deep learning, provides a solution to this problem. Most remote sensing imagery applications for tailings pond object detection using deep learning are based on computer vision, utilizing the true-color triple-band data of high spatial resolution imagery for information extraction. The advantage of remote sensing image data is their greater number of spectral bands (more than three), providing more abundant spectral information. There is a lack of research on fully harnessing multispectral band information to improve the detection precision of tailings ponds. Accordingly, using a sample dataset of tailings pond satellite images from the Gaofen-1 high-resolution Earth observation satellite, we improved the Faster R-CNN deep learning object detection model by increasing the inputs from three true-color bands to four multispectral bands. Moreover, we used the attention mechanism to recalibrate the input contributions. Subsequently, we used a step-by-step transfer learning method to improve and gradually train our model. The improved model could fully utilize the near-infrared (NIR) band information of the images to improve the precision of tailings pond detection. Compared with that of the three true-color band input models, the tailings pond detection average precision (AP) and recall notably improved in our model, with the AP increasing from 82.3% to 85.9% and recall increasing from 65.4% to 71.9%. This research could serve as a reference for using multispectral band information from remote sensing images in the construction and application of deep learning models. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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15 pages, 29941 KiB  
Article
Flood Detection Using Multiple Chinese Satellite Datasets during 2020 China Summer Floods
by Lianchong Zhang and Junshi Xia
Remote Sens. 2022, 14(1), 51; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14010051 - 23 Dec 2021
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 4456
Abstract
Multiple source satellite datasets, including the Gaofen (GF) series and Zhuhai-1 hyperspectral, are provided to detect and monitor the floods. Considering the complexity of land cover changes within the flooded areas and the different characteristics of the multi-source remote sensing dataset, we proposed [...] Read more.
Multiple source satellite datasets, including the Gaofen (GF) series and Zhuhai-1 hyperspectral, are provided to detect and monitor the floods. Considering the complexity of land cover changes within the flooded areas and the different characteristics of the multi-source remote sensing dataset, we proposed a new coarse-to-fine framework for detecting floods at a large scale. Firstly, the coarse results of the water body were generated by the binary segmentation of GF-3 SAR, the water indexes of GF-1/6 multispectral, and Zhuhai-1 hyperspectral images. Secondly, the fine results were achieved by the deep neural networks with noisy-label learning. More specifically, the Unet with the T-revision is adopted as the noisy label learning method. The results demonstrated the reliability and accuracy of water mapping retrieved by the noisy learning method. Finally, the differences in flooding patterns in different regions were also revealed. We presented examples of Poyang Lake to show the results of our framework. The rapid and robust flood monitoring method proposed is of great practical significance to the dynamic monitoring of flood situations and the quantitative assessment of flood disasters based on multiple Chinese satellite datasets. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Health Diagnosis Based on Remote Sensing)
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