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Computational Imaging Approaches, Challenges and Opportunities in Earth Observation

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

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2024 | Viewed by 3242

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
Interests: computer vision;AI; remote sensing data analysis; 3D pointcloud data analaysis

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Guest Editor
Division of Information Technology, Netaji Subhas University of Technology, Delhi, India
Interests: deep learning; remote sensing; medical imaging; metaheuristic algorithms

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Guest Editor
Cranfield Environment Centre, Cranfield University, Bedford, UK
Interests: remote sensing of land cover and use change; AI/machine learning for image processing

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Guest Editor
Research Centre for Computational Science and Mathematical Modelling, Coventry University, Coventry, UK
Interests: artificial Intelligence; data science; machine learning; computational intelligence; neural networks; deep learning; neuro-fuzzy systems; various nature-inspired algorithms
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Remotely Sensed (RS) images, such as spectral satellite images and the Synthesis Aperture Radar (SAR), viewing large parts of the earth, play an important role in addressing many different scientific and socio-economic problems around the world. The research on remotely sensed data based on different computational strategies, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques range from image enhancement, scene classification and segmentation to change detection, time-series analysis for detection and prediction purposes and multimodal data fusion for an improved prediction. Such analyses are used for numerous applications. Examples include, but are not limited to, monitoring the challenges and changes in the environment, such as forests, volcanoes, rivers and coastal areas, roads and urban areas, an estimation of the boundaries and level of disasters in earthquakes and natural fires, managing farms and agricultural areas and all challenges induced by carbon emissions and climate change. On the other hand, the fast-growing number of advanced ML, AI and image analysis algorithms, especially Deep Learning (DL) strategies and their deployment to the remote sensing domain, have enabled researchers to tackle computationally demanding problems in remote sensing, such as the analysis of the time-series of remotely sensed data or hyperspectral satellite imagery and real-time/near real-time data processing for applications such as the tracking and monitoring of natural disasters or human-induced hazards. That is supported by the advances in high performance computing, allowing the processing systems to perform parallel computations based on advanced ML and AI algorithms on high volumes of remotely sensed data and reduce the running time.

Considering all of the above-mentioned applications and opportunities, this Special Issue invites researchers from both academia and the industry to contribute their novel research findings for solving the wide range of existing challenges, addressing new application scenarios and identifying new opportunities in the remote sensing domain, by developing new AI and ML methods or demonstrating the application of the existing methods.

Topics may cover anything from classical image processing and the computer vision problems related to the remote sensing domain, to more recent and advanced topics such as satellite image time-series analysis and multimodal data fusion for joint decision making (e.g., multispectral, hyperspectral and SAR images). Review papers addressing the novel challenges in remote sensing will also be considered.

Dr. Sara Sharifzadeh
Dr. Priti Bansal
Dr. Daniel M. Simms
Prof. Dr. Vasile Palade
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

  • land cover and land use detection and monitoring
  • time-series analysis of RS data for detection/prediction
  • real-time/near real-time RS data analysis
  • multimodal data fusion of RS data for decision-making
  • RS image enhancement for undesired effects (cloud, noise, etc.)
  • data augmentation for improved decision-making
  • object tracking based on RS data
  • optimization techniques for improved modeling in RS data analysis domain

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 10718 KiB  
Article
Mapping Agricultural Land in Afghanistan’s Opium Provinces Using a Generalised Deep Learning Model and Medium Resolution Satellite Imagery
by Daniel M. Simms, Alex M. Hamer, Irmgard Zeiler, Lorenzo Vita and Toby W. Waine
Remote Sens. 2023, 15(19), 4714; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15194714 - 26 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1367
Abstract
Understanding the relationship between land use and opium production is critical for monitoring the dynamics of poppy cultivation and developing an effective counter narcotics policy in Afghanistan. However, mapping agricultural land accurately and rapidly is challenging, as current methods require resource-intensive and time [...] Read more.
Understanding the relationship between land use and opium production is critical for monitoring the dynamics of poppy cultivation and developing an effective counter narcotics policy in Afghanistan. However, mapping agricultural land accurately and rapidly is challenging, as current methods require resource-intensive and time consuming manual image-interpretation. Deep convolutional neural nets have been shown to greatly reduce the manual effort in mapping agriculture from satellite imagery but require large amounts of densely labelled training data for model training. Here we develop a generalised model using past images and labels from different medium resolution satellite sensors for fully automatic agricultural land classification using the latest medium resolution satellite imagery. The model (FCN-8) is first trained on Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) satellite images from 2007 to 2009. The effect of shape, texture and spectral features on model performance are investigated along with normalisation in order to standardise input medium resolution imagery from DMC, Landsat-5, Landsat-8, and Sentinel-2 for transfer learning between sensors and across years. Textural features make the highest contribution to overall accuracy (∼73%) while the effect of shape is minimal. The model accuracy on new images, with no additional training, is comparable to visual image interpretation (overall > 95%, user accuracy > 91%, producer accuracy > 85%, and frequency weighted intersection over union > 67%). The model is robust and was used to map agriculture from archive images (1990) and can be used in other areas with similar landscapes. The model can be updated by fine tuning using smaller, sparsely labelled datasets in the future. The generalised model was used to map the change in agricultural area in Helmand Province, showing the expansion of agricultural land into former desert areas. Training generalised deep learning models using data from both new and long-term EO programmes, with little or no requirement for fine tuning, is an exciting opportunity for automating image classification across datasets and through time that can improve our understanding of the environment. Full article
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34 pages, 5656 KiB  
Article
FSSBP: Fast Spatial–Spectral Back Projection Based on Pan-Sharpening Iterative Optimization
by Jingzhe Tao, Weihan Ni, Chuanming Song and Xianghai Wang
Remote Sens. 2023, 15(18), 4543; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15184543 - 15 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 768
Abstract
Pan-sharpening is an important means to improve the spatial resolution of multispectral (MS) images. Although a large number of pan-sharpening methods have been developed, improving the spatial resolution of MS while effectively maintaining its spectral information has not been well solved so far, [...] Read more.
Pan-sharpening is an important means to improve the spatial resolution of multispectral (MS) images. Although a large number of pan-sharpening methods have been developed, improving the spatial resolution of MS while effectively maintaining its spectral information has not been well solved so far, and it has also been taken as a criterion to measure whether the sharpened product can meet the practical needs. The back-projection (BP) method iteratively injects spectral information backwards into the sharpened results in a post-processing manner, which can effectively improve the generally unsatisfied spectral consistency problem in pan-sharpening methods. Although BP has received some attention in recent years in pan-sharpening research, the existing related work is basically limited to the direct utilization of the BP process and lacks a more in-depth intrinsic integration with pan-sharpening. In this paper, we analyze the current problems of improving the spectral consistency based on BP in pan-sharpening, and the main innovative works carried out on this basis include the following: (1) We introduce the spatial consistency condition and propose the spatial–spectral BP (SSBP) method, which takes into account both spatial and spectral consistency conditions, to improve the spectral quality while effectively solving the problem of spatial distortion in the results. (2) The proposed SSBP method is analyzed theoretically, and the convergence condition of SSBP and a more relaxed convergence condition for a specific BP type, degradation transpose BP, are given and proved theoretically. (3) Fast computation of BP and SSBP is investigated, and non-iterative fast BP (FBP) and fast SSBP algorithms (FSSBP) methods are given in a closed-form solution with significant improvement in computational efficiency. Experimental comparisons with combinations formed by seven different BP-related post-processing methods and up to 18 typical base methods show that the proposed methods are generally applicable to the optimization of the spatial–spectral quality of various sharpening methods. The fast method improves the computational speed by at least 27.5 times compared to the iterative version while maintaining the evaluation metrics well. Full article
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