Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-scale patches based image denoising using weighted nuclear norm minimisation

: As a prior knowledge, non-local self-similarity (NSS) has been widely utilised in ill-posed problems. Actually, similar textures appear not only in a single scale, but also in different scales. Unlike most existing patch-based methods that only explore NSS in the same scale, a multi-scale patches based image denoising algorithm is proposed in this study. The authors have designed a multi-scale strategy to expand the search space of block-matching, which will increase the probability of finding more similar patches. After that, the weighted nuclear norm minimisation (WNNM) algorithm is employed to reveal latent clean patches. With the join of the multi-scale framework, the performance of WNNM can be improved. The proposed algorithm can be used to solve NSS-based image restoration tasks. In this study, mainly image denoising is studied, and its effectiveness is derived through experiments on widely used test images.
Assessment of IMERG-V06, TRMM-3B42V7, SM2RAIN-ASCAT, and PERSIANN-CDR Precipitation Products over the Hindu Kush Mountains of Pakistan, South Asia

In this study, the performances of four satellite-based precipitation products (IMERG-V06 Final-Run, TRMM-3B42V7, SM2Rain-ASCAT, and PERSIANN-CDR) were assessed with reference to the measurements of in-situ gauges at daily, monthly, seasonal, and annual scales from 2010 to 2017, over the Hindu Kush Mountains of Pakistan. The products were evaluated over the entire domain and at point-to-pixel scales. Different evaluation indices (Correlation Coefficient (CC), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Bias, and relative Bias (rBias)) and categorical indices (False Alarm Ration (FAR), Critical Success Index (CSI), Success Ratio (SR), and Probability of Detection (POD)) were used to assess the performances of the products considered in this study. Our results indicated the following. (1) IMERG-V06 and PERSIANN capably tracked the spatio-temporal variation of precipitation over the studied region. (2) All satellite-based products were in better agreement with the reference data on the monthly scales than on daily time scales. (3) On seasonal scale, the precipitation detection skills of IMERG-V06 and PERSIANN-CDR were better than those of SM2Rain-ASCAT and TRMM-3B42V7. In all seasons, overall performance of IMERG-V06 and PERSIANN-CDR was better than TRMM-3B42V7 and SM2Rain-ASCAT. (4) However, all products were uncertain in detecting light and moderate precipitation events. Consequently, we recommend the use of IMERG-V06 and PERSIANN-CDR products for subsequent hydro-meteorological studies in the Hindu Kush range.
CNN-Based Tree Species Classification Using High Resolution RGB Image Data from Automated UAV Observations

Data on the distribution of tree species are often requested by forest managers, inventory agencies, foresters as well as private and municipal forest owners. However, the automated detection of tree species based on passive remote sensing data from aerial surveys is still not sufficiently developed to achieve reliable results independent of the phenological stage, time of day, season, tree vitality and prevailing atmospheric conditions. Here, we introduce a novel tree species classification approach based on high resolution RGB image data gathered during automated UAV flights that overcomes these insufficiencies. For the classification task, a computationally lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) was designed. We show that with the chosen CNN model architecture, average classification accuracies of 92% can be reached independently of the illumination conditions and the phenological stages of four different tree species. We also show that a minimal ground sampling density of 1.6 cm/px is needed for the classification model to be able to make use of the spatial-structural information in the data. Finally, to demonstrate the applicability of the presented approach to derive spatially explicit tree species information, a gridded product is generated that yields an average classification accuracy of 88%.
Assessment of Spatio-Temporal Landscape Changes from VHR Images in Three Different Permafrost Areas in the Western Russian Arctic

Our study highlights the usefulness of very high resolution (VHR) images to detect various types of disturbances over permafrost areas using three example regions in different permafrost zones. The study focuses on detecting subtle changes in land cover classes, thermokarst water bodies, river dynamics, retrogressive thaw slumps (RTS) and infrastructure in the Yamal Peninsula, Urengoy and Pechora regions. Very high-resolution optical imagery (sub-meter) derived from WorldView, QuickBird and GeoEye in conjunction with declassified Corona images were involved in the analyses. The comparison of very high-resolution images acquired in 2003/2004 and 2016/2017 indicates a pronounced increase in the extent of tundra and a slight increase of land covered by water. The number of water bodies increased in all three regions, especially in discontinuous permafrost, where 14.86% of new lakes and ponds were initiated between 2003 and 2017. The analysis of the evolution of two river channels in Yamal and Urengoy indicates the dominance of erosion during the last two decades. An increase of both rivers’ lengths and a significant widening of the river channels were also observed. The number and total surface of RTS in the Yamal Peninsula strongly increased between 2004 and 2016. A mean annual headwall retreat rate of 1.86 m/year was calculated. Extensive networks of infrastructure occurred in the Yamal Peninsula in the last two decades, stimulating the initiation of new thermokarst features. The significant warming and seasonal variations of the hydrologic cycle, in particular, increased snow water equivalent acted in favor of deepening of the active layer; thus, an increasing number of thermokarst lake formations.
An Accurate Vegetation and Non-Vegetation Differentiation Approach Based on Land Cover Classification

Accurate vegetation detection is important for many applications, such as crop yield estimation, land cover land use monitoring, urban growth monitoring, drought monitoring, etc. Popular conventional approaches to vegetation detection incorporate the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), which uses the red and near infrared (NIR) bands, and enhanced vegetation index (EVI), which uses red, NIR, and the blue bands. Although NDVI and EVI are efficient, their accuracies still have room for further improvement. In this paper, we propose a new approach to vegetation detection based on land cover classification. That is, we first perform an accurate classification of 15 or more land cover types. The land covers such as grass, shrub, and trees are then grouped into vegetation and other land cover types such as roads, buildings, etc. are grouped into non-vegetation. Similar to NDVI and EVI, only RGB and NIR bands are needed in our proposed approach. If Laser imaging, Detection, and Ranging (LiDAR) data are available, our approach can also incorporate LiDAR in the detection process. Results using a well-known dataset demonstrated that the proposed approach is feasible and achieves more accurate vegetation detection than both NDVI and EVI. In particular, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) approach performed 6% better than NDVI and 50% better than EVI in terms of overall accuracy (OA).
Detection and Classification of Non-Photosynthetic Vegetation from PRISMA Hyperspectral Data in Croplands

This study introduces a first assessment of the capabilities of PRISMA (PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa)—the new hyperspectral satellite sensor of the Italian Space Agency (ASI)—for Non-Photosynthetic Vegetation (NPV) monitoring, a topic which is becoming very relevant in the field of sustainable agriculture, being an indicator of crop residue (CR) presence in the field. Data-sets collected during the mission validation phase in croplands are used for mapping the NPV presence and for modelling the diagnostic absorption band of cellulose around 2.1 μm with an Exponential Gaussian Optimization approach, in the perspective of the prediction of the abundance of crop residues. Results proved that PRISMA data are suitable for these tasks, and call for further investigation to achieve quantitative estimates of specific biophysical variables, also in the framework of other hyperspectral missions.
Open Data and Machine Learning to Model the Occurrence of Fire in the Ecoregion of "Llanos Colombo-Venezolanos"

A fire probability map is an important tool for landscape management, providing better identification of areas prone to fires and helping optimize the allocation of limited resources for fire prevention, control, and management. In this study, the random forest machine learning algorithm was applied to model the probability of fire occurrence in the Colombian-Venezuelan plains (llanos) ecoregion in South America. Information on burned areas was collected using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Product MCD64A1 for the period 2015–2019. We also used spatial information of related factors that were grouped into four levels of information: topography, human presence, vegetation, and climate-related variables. The model had an accuracy of 94%, which indicates the performance of the model was excellent. The cartography generated from the model can be used as base information in the context of fire management in the region, to identify areas for prioritizing efforts and attention. The probability of occurrence zoning results indicates that the very low category covers the largest area (28.2%), followed by low (23.2%), very high (17.6%), moderate (17.2%), and high (13.8%).
Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Drought and Impact on Vegetation in North and West Africa Based on Multi-Satellite Data

Studying the significant impacts of drought on vegetation is crucial to understand its dynamics and interrelationships with precipitation, soil moisture, and temperature. In North and West Africa regions, the effects of drought on vegetation have not been clearly stated. Therefore, the present study aims to bring out the drought fluctuations within various types of Land Cover (LC) (Grasslands, Croplands, Savannas, and Forest) in North and West Africa regions. The drought characteristics were evaluated by analyzing the monthly Self-Calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) in different timescale from 2002 to 2018. Then, the frequency of droughts was examined over the same period. The results have revealed two groups of years (dry years and normal years), based on drought intensity. The selected years were used to compare the shifting between vegetation and desert. The Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), the Temperature Condition Index (TCI), the Precipitation Condition Index (PCI), and the Soil Moisture Condition Index (SMCI) were also used to investigate the spatiotemporal variation of drought and to determine which LC class was more vulnerable to drought risk. Our results revealed that Grasslands and Croplands in the West region, and Grasslands, Croplands, and Savannas in the North region are more sensitive to drought. A higher correlation was observed among the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Land Surface Temperature (LST), Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), and Soil Moisture (SM). Our findings suggested that NDVI, TRMM, and SM are more suitable for monitoring drought over the study area and have a reliable accuracy (R2 > 0.70) concerning drought prediction. The outcomes of the current research could, explicitly, contribute progressively towards improving specific drought mitigation strategies and disaster risk reduction at regional and national levels.
A Novel Scheme for Merging Active and Passive Satellite Soil Moisture Retrievals Based on Maximizing the Signal to Noise Ratio

In this research, we developed and evaluated a new scheme for merging soil moisture (SM) retrievals from both passive and active microwave satellite estimates, based on maximized signal-to-noise ratios, in order to produce improved SM products using least-squares theory. The fractional mean-squared-error (fMSE) derived from the triple collocation method (TCM) was used for this purpose. The proposed scheme was applied by using a threshold between signal and noise at fMSE equal to 0.5 to maintain the high-quality SM observations. In the regions where TCM is unreliable, we propose four scenarios based on the determinations of correlations between all three SM products of TCM at significance levels (i.e., p-values). The proposed scheme was applied to combine SM retrievals from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT), and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) to produce SMAP+ASCAT and AMSR2+ASCAT SM datasets at a global scale for the period from June 2015 to December 2017. The merged SM dataset performance was assessed against SM data from ground measurements of international soil moisture network (ISMN), Global Land Data Assimilation System-Noah (GLDAS-Noah) and ERA5. The results show that the two merged SM datasets showed significant improvement over their parent products in the high average temporal correlation coefficients (R) and the lowest root mean squared difference (RMSE), compared with in-situ measurements over different networks of ISMN. Moreover, these datasets outperformed their parent products over different land cover types in most regions of the world, with a high overall average temporal R and the lowest overall average RMSE value with GLDAS and ERA5. In addition, the suggested scenarios improved SM performance in the regions with unreliable TCMs.
Água residuária de esgoto doméstico tratado na atividade microbiana do solo e crescimento da mamoneira

Wastewater from domestic sewage presents levels of macro and micro nutrients sufficient to support a large part of the crops. Besides being a viable alternative to increase water availability, it is an effective way to control pollution and preserve the environment. In this context, an experiment was carried out to evaluate the influence of applying different dilutions of treated wastewater from domestic sewage on the microbial activity of a distrophic cohesive yellow Latosol in the Reconcavo of Bahia. Its effect on early growth of dwarf castor bean plants MPB 01 were also evaluated. Soil microbial activity and growth characteristics such as plant height, stem diameter, shoot dry weight, root dry weight and root volume were evaluated. According to the results, the effluent of treated wastewater without dilution, stimulates microbial activity of distrophic cohesive yellow Latosol and impairs the early growth of dwarf castor bean MPB 01.
Comprehensive Comparisons of State-of-the-Art Gridded Precipitation Estimates for Hydrological Applications over Southern China

Satellite-based precipitation estimates with high quality and spatial-temporal resolutions play a vital role in forcing global or regional meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural models, which are especially useful over large poorly gauged regions. In this study, we apply various statistical indicators to comprehensively analyze the quality and compare the performance of five newly released satellite and reanalysis precipitation products against China Merged Precipitation Analysis (CMPA) rain gauge data, respectively, with 0.1° × 0.1° spatial resolution and two temporal scales (daily and hourly) over southern China from June to August in 2019. These include Precipitation Estimates from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks Cloud Classification System (PERSIANN-CCS), European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis v5 (ERA5-Land), Fengyun-4 (FY-4A), Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP), and Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG). Results indicate that: (1) all five products overestimate the accumulated rainfall in the summer, with FY-4A being the most severe; additionally, FY-4A cannot capture the spatial and temporal distribution characteristics of precipitation over southern China. (2) IMERG and GSMaP perform better than the other three datasets at both daily and hourly scales; IMERG correlates slightly better than GSMaP against CMPA data, while it performs worse than GSMaP in terms of probability of detection (POD). (3) ERA5-Land performs better than PERSIANN-CCS and FY-4A at daily scale but shows the worst correlation coefficient (CC), false alarm ratio (FAR), and equitable threat score (ETS) of all precipitation products at hourly scale. (4) The rankings of overall performance on precipitation estimations for this region are IMERG, GSMaP, ERA5-Land, PERSIANN-CCS, and FY-4A at daily scale; and IMERG, GSMaP, PERSIANN-CCS, FY-4A, and ERA5-Land at hourly scale. These findings will provide valuable feedback for improving the current satellite-based precipitation retrieval algorithms and also provide preliminary references for flood forecasting and natural disaster early warning.
Investigating the Susceptibility to Failure of a Rock Cliff by Integrating Structure-from-Motion Analysis and 3D Geomechanical Modelling

Multi-temporal UAV and digital photo surveys have been acquired between 2017 and 2020 on a coastal cliff in soft rocks in South-Eastern Italy for hazard assessment and the corresponding point clouds have been processed and compared. The multi-temporal survey results provide indications of a progressive deepening process of erosion and detachment of blocks from the mid-height portion of the cliff, with the upper stiffer rock stratum working provisionally as a shelf against the risk of general collapse. Based on the DEM model obtained, a three-dimensional geomechanical finite element model has been created and analyzed in order to investigate the general stability of the cliff and to detect the rock portions which are more susceptible to failure. Concerning the evolving erosion process, active in the cliff, the photogrammetric analyses and the modeling simulations result in agreement and a proneness to both local and general instabilities has been achieved.
Analysing the Driving Forces and Environmental Effects of Urban Expansion by Mapping the Speed and Acceleration of Built-Up Areas in China between 1978 and 2017

Abundant data sets produced from long-term series of high-resolution remote sensing data have made it possible to explore urban issues across different spatiotemporal scales. Based on a 40-year impervious area data set released by Tsinghua University, a method was developed to map the speed and acceleration of urban built-up areas. With the mapping results of the two indices, we characterised the spatiotemporal dynamics of built-up area expansion and captured different types of expansion. Combined with socioeconomic data, we examined the temporal changes and spatial heterogeneity of driving forces with an ordinary least square (OLS) model and a panel data model, as well as exploring the environmental effects of the expansion. Our results reveal that China has experienced drastic urban expansion over the last four decades. Among all cities, megacities and large cities in eastern China, as well as megacities in central and northeast China have experienced the most dramatic urban expansion. A growing number of cities are categorised as thriving, which means that they have both high expansion speed and acceleration. The overall driving force of urban expansion has significantly increased. More specifically, it was associated with population increase in the early stages; however, since 2000, it has been substantially associated with increases in GDP and fixed asset investments. The major driving factors also differ between regions and urban sizes. Urban expansion is identified as being closely associated with environmental deterioration; thus, speed and acceleration should be included as key indicators in exploring the environmental effects of urban expansion. In summary, the results of the presented case study, based on a data set of China, indicate that speed and acceleration are useful in analysing the driving forces of urban expansion and its environmental effects, and may generate more interest in related research.
Optimizing Near Real-Time Detection of Deforestation on Tropical Rainforests Using Sentinel-1 Data

Early Warning Systems (EWS) for near real-time detection of deforestation are a fundamental component of public policies focusing on the reduction in forest biomass loss and associated CO2 emissions. Most of the operational EWS are based on optical data, which are severely limited by the cloud cover in tropical environments. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data can help to overcome this observational gap. SAR measurements, however, can be altered by atmospheric effects on and variations in surface moisture. Different techniques of time series (TS) stabilization have been used to mitigate the instability of C-band SAR measurements. Here, we evaluate the performance of two different approaches to SAR TS stabilization, harmonic deseasonalization and spatial stabilization, as well as two deforestation detection techniques, Adaptive Linear Thresholding (ALT) and maximum likelihood classification (MLC). We set up a rigorous, Amazon-wide validation experiment using the Google Earth Engine platform to sample and process Sentinel-1A data of nearly 6000 locations in the whole Brazilian Amazonian basin, generating more than 8M processed samples. Half of those locations correspond to non-degraded forest areas, while the other half pertained to 2019 deforested areas. The detection results showed that the spatial stabilization algorithm improved the results of the MLC approach, reaching 94.36% global accuracy. The ALT detection algorithm performed better, reaching 95.91% global accuracy, regardless of the use of any stabilization method. The results of this experiment are being used to develop an operational EWS in the Brazilian Amazon.
Adaptive-SFSDAF for Spatiotemporal Image Fusion that Selectively Uses Class Abundance Change Information

Many spatiotemporal image fusion methods in remote sensing have been developed to blend highly resolved spatial images and highly resolved temporal images to solve the problem of a trade-off between the spatial and temporal resolution from a single sensor. Yet, none of the spatiotemporal fusion methods considers how the various temporal changes between different pixels affect the performance of the fusion results; to develop an improved fusion method, these temporal changes need to be integrated into one framework. Adaptive-SFSDAF extends the existing fusion method that incorporates sub-pixel class fraction change information in Flexible Spatiotemporal DAta Fusion (SFSDAF) by modifying spectral unmixing to select spectral unmixing adaptively in order to greatly improve the efficiency of the algorithm. Accordingly, the main contributions of the proposed adaptive-SFSDAF method are twofold. One is to address the detection of outliers of temporal change in the image during the period between the origin and prediction dates, as these pixels are the most difficult to estimate and affect the performance of the spatiotemporal fusion methods. The other primary contribution is to establish an adaptive unmixing strategy according to the guided mask map, thus effectively eliminating a great number of insignificant unmixed pixels. The proposed method is compared with the state-of-the-art Flexible Spatiotemporal DAta Fusion (FSDAF), SFSDAF, FIT-FC, and Unmixing-Based Data Fusion (UBDF) methods, and the fusion accuracy is evaluated both quantitatively and visually. The experimental results show that adaptive-SFSDAF achieves outstanding performance in balancing computational efficiency and the accuracy of the fusion results.