No Arabic abstract
Urban water is important for the urban ecosystem. Accurate and efficient detection of urban water with remote sensing data is of great significance for urban management and planning. In this paper, we proposed a new method to combine Google Earth Engine (GEE) with multiscale convolutional neural network (MSCNN) to extract urban water from Landsat images, which is summarized as offline training and online prediction (OTOP). That is, the training of MSCNN was completed offline, and the process of urban water extraction was implemented on GEE with the trained parameters of MSCNN. The OTOP can give full play to the respective advantages of GEE and CNN, and make the use of deep learning method on GEE more flexible. It can process available satellite images with high performance without data download and storage, and the overall performance of urban water extraction is also higher than that of the modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI) and random forest. The mean kappa, F1-score and intersection over union (IoU) of urban water extraction with the OTOP in Changchun, Wuhan, Kunming and Guangzhou reached 0.924, 0.930 and 0.869, respectively. The results of the extended validation in the other major cities of China also show that the OTOP is robust and can be used to extract different types of urban water, which benefits from the structural design and training of the MSCNN. Therefore, the OTOP is especially suitable for the study of large-scale and long-term urban water change detection in the background of urbanization.
The digitization of historical maps enables the study of ancient, fragile, unique, and hardly accessible information sources. Main map features can be retrieved and tracked through the time for subsequent thematic analysis. The goal of this work is the vectorization step, i.e., the extraction of vector shapes of the objects of interest from raster images of maps. We are particularly interested in closed shape detection such as buildings, building blocks, gardens, rivers, etc. in order to monitor their temporal evolution. Historical map images present significant pattern recognition challenges. The extraction of closed shapes by using traditional Mathematical Morphology (MM) is highly challenging due to the overlapping of multiple map features and texts. Moreover, state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are perfectly designed for content image filtering but provide no guarantee about closed shape detection. Also, the lack of textural and color information of historical maps makes it hard for CNN to detect shapes that are represented by only their boundaries. Our contribution is a pipeline that combines the strengths of CNN (efficient edge detection and filtering) and MM (guaranteed extraction of closed shapes) in order to achieve such a task. The evaluation of our approach on a public dataset shows its effectiveness for extracting the closed boundaries of objects in historical maps.
Global forest cover is critical to the provision of certain ecosystem services. With the advent of the google earth engine cloud platform, fine resolution global land cover mapping task could be accomplished in a matter of days instead of years. The amount of global forest cover (GFC) products has been steadily increasing in the last decades. However, its hard for users to select suitable one due to great differences between these products, and the accuracy of these GFC products has not been verified on global scale. To provide guidelines for users and producers, it is urgent to produce a validation sample set at the global level. However, this labeling task is time and labor consuming, which has been the main obstacle to the progress of global land cover mapping. In this research, a labor-efficient semi-automatic framework is introduced to build a biggest ever Forest Sample Set (FSS) contained 395280 scattered samples categorized as forest, shrubland, grassland, impervious surface, etc. On the other hand, to provide guidelines for the users, we comprehensively validated the local and global mapping accuracy of all existing 30m GFC products, and analyzed and mapped the agreement of them. Moreover, to provide guidelines for the producers, optimal sampling strategy was proposed to improve the global forest classification. Furthermore, a new global forest cover named GlobeForest2020 has been generated, which proved to improve the previous highest state-of-the-art accuracies (obtained by Gong et al., 2017) by 2.77% in uncertain grids and by 1.11% in certain grids.
There is a growing demand for accurate high-resolution land cover maps in many fields, e.g., in land-use planning and biodiversity conservation. Developing such maps has been performed using Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) methods, which usually reach good accuracies, but require a high human supervision and the best configuration for one image can hardly be extrapolated to a different image. Recently, the deep learning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding results in object recognition in the field of computer vision. However, they have not been fully explored yet in land cover mapping for detecting species of high biodiversity conservation interest. This paper analyzes the potential of CNNs-based methods for plant species detection using free high-resolution Google Earth T M images and provides an objective comparison with the state-of-the-art OBIA-methods. We consider as case study the detection of Ziziphus lotus shrubs, which are protected as a priority habitat under the European Union Habitats Directive. According to our results, compared to OBIA-based methods, the proposed CNN-based detection model, in combination with data-augmentation, transfer learning and pre-processing, achieves higher performance with less human intervention and the knowledge it acquires in the first image can be transferred to other images, which makes the detection process very fast. The provided methodology can be systematically reproduced for other species detection.
Heretofore, global burned area (BA) products are only available at coarse spatial resolution, since most of the current global BA products are produced with the help of active fire detection or dense time-series change analysis, which requires very high temporal resolution. In this study, however, we focus on automated global burned area mapping approach based on Landsat images. By utilizing the huge catalog of satellite imagery as well as the high-performance computing capacity of Google Earth Engine, we proposed an automated pipeline for generating 30-meter resolution global-scale annual burned area map from time-series of Landsat images, and a novel 30-meter resolution global annual burned area map of 2015 (GABAM 2015) is released. GABAM 2015 consists of spatial extent of fires that occurred during 2015 and not of fires that occurred in previous years. Cross-comparison with recent Fire_cci version 5.0 BA product found a similar spatial distribution and a strong correlation ($R^2=0.74$) between the burned areas from the two products, although differences were found in specific land cover categories (particularly in agriculture land). Preliminary global validation showed the commission and omission error of GABAM 2015 are 13.17% and 30.13%, respectively.
Automatic CT segmentation of proximal femur is crucial for the diagnosis and risk stratification of orthopedic diseases; however, current methods for the femur CT segmentation mainly rely on manual interactive segmentation, which is time-consuming and has limitations in both accuracy and reproducibility. In this study, we proposed an approach based on deep learning for the automatic extraction of the periosteal and endosteal contours of proximal femur in order to differentiate cortical and trabecular bone compartments. A three-dimensional (3D) end-to-end fully convolutional neural network, which can better combine the information between neighbor slices and get more accurate segmentation results, was developed for our segmentation task. 100 subjects aged from 50 to 87 years with 24,399 slices of proximal femur CT images were enrolled in this study. The separation of cortical and trabecular bone derived from the QCT software MIAF-Femur was used as the segmentation reference. We randomly divided the whole dataset into a training set with 85 subjects for 10-fold cross-validation and a test set with 15 subjects for evaluating the performance of models. Two models with the same network structures were trained and they achieved a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 97.87% and 96.49% for the periosteal and endosteal contours, respectively. To verify the excellent performance of our model for femoral segmentation, we measured the volume of different parts of the femur and compared it with the ground truth and the relative errors between predicted result and ground truth are all less than 5%. It demonstrated a strong potential for clinical use, including the hip fracture risk prediction and finite element analysis.