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The profound impacts of severe air pollution on human health, ecological balance, and economic stability are undeniable. Precise air quality forecasting stands as a crucial necessity, enabling governmental bodies and vulnerable communities to proactively take essential measures to reduce exposure to detrimental pollutants. Previous research has primarily focused on predicting air quality using only time-series data. However, the importance of remote-sensing image data has received limited attention. This paper proposes a new multi-modal deep-learning model, Res-GCN, which integrates high spatial resolution remote-sensing images and time-series air quality data from multiple stations to forecast future air quality. Res-GCN employs two deep-learning networks, one utilizing the residual network to extract hidden visual information from remote-sensing images, and another using a dynamic spatio-temporal graph convolution network to capture spatio-temporal information from time-series data. By extracting features from two different modalities, improved predictive performance can be achieved. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, experiments were conducted on two real-world datasets. The results show that the Res-GCN model effectively extracts multi-modal features, significantly enhancing the accuracy of multi-step predictions. Compared to the best-performing baseline model, the multi-step prediction's mean absolute error, root mean square error, and mean absolute percentage error increased by approximately 6%, 7%, and 7%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geological hazards often occur in mountainous areas and are sudden and hidden, so it is important to identify and assess geological hazards. In this paper, the western mountainous area of Beijing was selected as the study area. We conducted research on landslides, collapses, and unstable slopes in the study area. The surface deformation of the study area was monitored by multi-temporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (MT-InSAR), using a combination of multi-looking point selection and permanent scatterer (PS) point selection methods. Random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), convolutional neural network (CNN), and recurrent neural network (RNN) models were selected for the assessment of geological hazard susceptibility. Sixteen geological hazard-influencing factors were collected, and their information values were calculated using their features. Multicollinearity analysis with the relief-F method was used to calculate the correlation and importance of the factors for factor selection. The results show that the deformation rate along the line-of-sight (LOS) direction is between −44 mm/year and 28 mm/year. A total of 60 geological hazards were identified by combining surface deformation with optical imagery and other data, including 7 collapses, 25 unstable slopes, and 28 landslides. Forty-eight of the identified geological hazards are not recorded in the Beijing geological hazards list. The most effective model in the study area was RF. The percentage of geological hazard susceptibility zoning in the study area is as follows: very low susceptibility 27.40%, low susceptibility 28.06%, moderate susceptibility 21.19%, high susceptibility 13.80%, very high susceptibility 9.57%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate air quality prediction is of great significance for pollution prevention and disaster prevention. Effective and reliable prediction models are needed not only for short time prediction, but are even more important for long time-series future predictions. In the long time series, most of the current models might not function as accurately as in the short period and thus a new model is required. In this paper, the new PM2.5 predictor is proposed to achieve accurate long time series PM2.5 prediction in Beijing. The predictor simplifies the input parameters through Spearman correlation analysis and implements the long time series prediction through Informer. The results show that AQI, CO, NO2, and PM10 concentrations are selected from the air quality data, and Dew Point Temperature (DEWP) and wind speed are incorporated from two meteorological data to better improve the prediction efficiency by almost 27%. By comparing with LSTM and attention-LSTM models, the model constructed in this paper performs well in different prediction time periods, with at least 21%, 19%, 28%, and 35% improvement in accuracy in four prediction time series: 48 h, 7 days, 14 days, and 30 days. In conclusion, the proposed model is proved to solve the problem of predicting long time series PM2.5 concentrations in the future, which can make up for the shortcomings of the currently existing models and have good application value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Day by day pollution in cities is increasing due to urbanization. One of the biggest challenges posed by the rapid migration of inhabitants into cities is increased air pollution. Sustainable Development Goal 11 indicates that 99 percent of the world's urban population breathes polluted air. In such a trend of urbanization, predicting the concentrations of pollutants in advance is very important. Predictions of pollutants would help city administrations to take timely measures for ensuring Sustainable Development Goal 11. In data engineering, imputation and the removal of outliers are very important steps prior to forecasting the concentration of air pollutants. For pollution and meteorological data, missing values and outliers are critical problems that need to be addressed. This paper proposes a novel method called multiple iterative imputation using autoencoder-based long short-term memory (MIA-LSTM) which uses iterative imputation using an extra tree regressor as an estimator for the missing values in multivariate data followed by an LSTM autoencoder for the detection and removal of outliers present in the dataset. The preprocessed data were given to a multivariate LSTM for forecasting PM2.5 concentration. This paper also presents the effect of removing outliers and missing values from the dataset as well as the effect of imputing missing values in the process of forecasting the concentrations of air pollutants. The proposed method provides better results for forecasting with a root mean square error (RMSE) value of 9.8883. The obtained results were compared with the traditional gated recurrent unit (GRU), 1D convolutional neural network (CNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) approaches for a dataset of the Aotizhonhxin area of Beijing in China. Similar results were observed for another two locations in China and one location in India. The results obtained show that imputation and outlier/anomaly removal improve the accuracy of air pollution forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of the energy industry and the growth of the global energy demand in recent years, the development of the photovoltaic industry has become increasingly significant. However, the development of the PV industry is constrained by high land costs, and land in central cities and industrial areas is often very expensive and unsuitable for the installation of PV equipment in large areas. With this background knowledge, the key to evaluating the PV potential is by counting the rooftop information of buildings, and an ideal solution for extracting building rooftop information is from remote sensing satellite images using the deep learning method; however, the deep learning method often requires large-scale labeled samples, and the labeling of remote sensing images is often time-consuming and expensive. To reduce the burden of data labeling, models trained on large datasets can be used as pre-trained models (e.g., ImageNet) to provide prior knowledge for training. However, most of the existing pre-trained model parameters are not suitable for direct transfer to remote sensing tasks. In this paper, we design a pseudo-label-guided self-supervised learning (PGSSL) semantic segmentation network structure based on high-resolution remote sensing images to extract building information. The pseudo-label-guided learning method allows the feature results extracted by the pretext task to be more applicable to the target task and ultimately improves segmentation accuracy. Our proposed method achieves better results than current contrastive learning methods in most experiments and uses only about 20–50% of the labeled data to achieve comparable performance with random initialization. In addition, a more accurate statistical method for building density distribution is designed based on the semantic segmentation results. This method addresses the last step of the extraction results oriented to the PV potential assessment, and this paper is validated in Beijing, China, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effective refuge area is a key indicator in the study of emergency shelters. Accurately extracting the effective refuge area and analyzing the effectiveness of emergency shelters are of great significance for site selection, spatial distribution, and the evaluation of suitability. Beijing is one of only three capitals in the world located in a high-seismic-intensity zone of magnitude 8. The fast and accurate monitoring of effective refuge areas and an analysis of the effectiveness of emergency shelters are conducive to evacuation planning and disaster prevention and mitigation, and they promote the construction of a resilient city. However, the extraction of effective refuge areas in existing studies is not only a time-consuming and labor-intensive task but also has accuracy and efficiency problems, resulting in less precise validity analyses. In this paper, a remote sensing monitoring technology system for the effective refuge areas of emergency shelters is proposed based on multi-source data. Different methods were used to extract various land features, such as buildings and collapsed areas, water, dense areas of understory vegetation, and steep slope areas that cannot be evacuated, to obtain the effective refuge area at a detailed scale, in combination with the service radius of emergency shelters, the population distribution, and the actual road network, the criteria for effectiveness analysis were established for the effective open space ratio, capacity, per capita accessible effective refuge area, and population allocation gap. Taking the area within the Fifth Ring Road of Beijing as an example, the effectiveness of emergency shelters was analyzed at both the whole scale and a local scale. The results show that the effective refuge areas of different emergency shelters in Beijing vary significantly, with the smallest effective refuge area being located in Rings 2–3 and the largest one being located in Rings 4–5; between different regions, there are differences in the effectiveness. This study provides a feasible method for the fast, accurate, and detailed extraction of the effective refuge areas of emergency shelters and also provides a reference for emergency planning for disaster prevention and mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predictions from time series data can help us sense development trends and make scientific decisions in advance. The commonly used forecasting methods with backpropagation consume a lot of computational resources. The deep echo state network (DeepESN) is an advanced prediction method with a deep neural network structure and training algorithm without backpropagation. In this paper, a Bayesian optimization algorithm (BOA) is proposed to optimize DeepESN to address the problem of increasing parameter scale. Firstly, the DeepESN was studied and constructed as the basic prediction model for the time series data. Secondly, the BOA was reconstructed, based on the DeepESN, for optimal parameter searching. The algorithm is proposed within the framework of the DeepESN. Thirdly, an experiment was conducted to verify the DeepESN with a BOA within three datasets: simulation data generated from computer programs, a real humidity dataset collected from Beijing, and a power load dataset obtained from America. Compared with the models of BP (backpropagation), LSTM (long short-term memory), GRU (gated recurrent unit), and ESN (echo state network), DeepESN obtained optimal results, which were 0.0719, 18.6707, and 764.5281 using RMSE evaluation. While getting better accuracy, the BOA optimization time was only 323.4 s, 563.2 s, and 9854 s for the three datasets. It is more efficient than grid search and grey wolf optimizer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air quality plays a vital role in people's health, and air quality forecasting can assist in decision making for government planning and sustainable development. In contrast, it is challenging to multi-step forecast accurately due to its complex and nonlinear caused by both temporal and spatial dimensions. Deep models, with their ability to model strong nonlinearities, have become the primary methods for air quality forecasting. However, because of the lack of mechanism-based analysis, uninterpretability forecasting makes decisions risky, especially when the government makes decisions. This paper proposes an interpretable variational Bayesian deep learning model with information self-screening for PM2.5 forecasting. Firstly, based on factors related to PM2.5 concentration, e.g., temperature, humidity, wind speed, spatial distribution, etc., an interpretable multivariate data screening structure for PM2.5 forecasting was established to catch as much helpful information as possible. Secondly, the self-screening layer was implanted in the deep learning network to optimize the selection of input variables. Further, following implantation of the screening layer, a variational Bayesian gated recurrent unit (GRU) network was constructed to overcome the complex distribution of PM2.5 and achieve accurate multi-step forecasting. The high accuracy of the proposed method is verified by PM2.5 data in Beijing, China, which provides an effective way, with multiple factors for PM2.5 forecasting determined using deep learning technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air pollution is a growing problem and poses a challenge to people's healthy lives. Accurate prediction of air pollutant concentrations is considered the key to air pollution warning and management. In this paper, a novel PM2.5 concentration prediction model, CBAM-CNN-Bi LSTM, is constructed by deep learning techniques based on the principles related to spatial big data. This model consists of the convolutional block attention module (CBAM), the convolutional neural network (CNN), and the bi-directional long short-term memory neural network (Bi LSTM). CBAM is applied to the extraction of feature relationships between pollutant data and meteorological data and assists in deeply obtaining the spatial distribution characteristics of PM2.5 concentrations. As the output layer, Bi LSTM obtains the variation pattern of PM2.5 concentrations from spatial data, overcomes the problem of long-term dependence on PM2.5 concentrations, and achieves the task of accurately forecasting PM2.5 concentrations at multiple sites. Based on real datasets, we perform an experimental evaluation and the results show that, in comparison to other models, CBAM-CNN-Bi LSTM improves the accuracy of PM2.5 concentration prediction. For the prediction tasks from 1 to 12 h, our proposed prediction model performs well. For the 13 to 48 h prediction task, the CBAM-CNN-Bi LSTM also achieves satisfactory results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultra-short-term load demand forecasting is significant to the rapid response and real-time dispatching of the power demand side. Considering too many random factors that affect the load, this paper combines convolution, long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU) algorithms to propose an ultra-short-term load forecasting model based on deep learning. Firstly, more than 100,000 pieces of historical load and meteorological data from Beijing in the three years from 2016 to 2018 were collected, and the meteorological data were divided into 18 types considering the actual meteorological characteristics of Beijing. Secondly, after the standardized processing of the time-series samples, the convolution filter was used to extract the features of the high-order samples to reduce the number of training parameters. On this basis, the LSTM layer and GRU layer were used for modeling based on time series. A dropout layer was introduced after each layer to reduce the risk of overfitting. Finally, load prediction results were output as a dense layer. In the model training process, the mean square error (MSE) was used as the objective optimization function to train the deep learning model and find the optimal super parameter. In addition, based on the average training time, training error, and prediction error, this paper verifies the effectiveness and practicability of the load prediction model proposed under the deep learning structure in this paper by comparing it with four other models including GRU, LSTM, Conv-GRU, and Conv-LSTM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate forecasting of future meteorological elements is critical and has profoundly affected human life in many aspects from rainstorm warning to flight safety. The conventional numerical weather prediction (NWP) sometimes leads to unsatisfactory performance due to inappropriate initial state settings. In this paper, a short-term weather forecasting model based on wavelet packet denoising and Catboost is proposed, which takes advantage of the fusion information combining the historical observation data with the prior knowledge from NWP. The feature selection and spatiotemporal feather addition are also explored to further improve performance. The proposed method is evaluated on the datasets provided by Beijing weather stations. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with many deep-learning or machine-learning methods such as LSTM, Seq2Seq, and random forest, the proposed Catboost model incorporated with wavelet packet denoising can achieve shorter convergence time and higher prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concentration of PM2.5 is an important index to measure the degree of air pollution. When it exceeds the standard value, it is considered to cause pollution and lower the air quality, which is harmful to human health and can cause a variety of diseases, i.e., asthma, chronic bronchitis, etc. Therefore, the prediction of PM2.5 concentration is helpful to reduce its harm. In this paper, a hybrid model called CNN-BiLSTM-Attention is proposed to predict the PM2.5 concentration over the next two days. First, we select the PM2.5 concentration data in hours from January 2013 to February 2017 of Shunyi District, Beijing. The auxiliary data includes air quality data and meteorological data. We use the sliding window method for preprocessing and dividing the corresponding data into a training set, a validation set, and a test set. Second, CNN-BiLSTM-Attention is composed of the convolutional neural network, bidirectional long short-term memory neural network, and attention mechanism. The parameters of this network structure are determined by the minimum error in the training process, including the size of the convolution kernel, activation function, batch size, dropout rate, learning rate, etc. We determine the feature size of the input and output by evaluating the performance of the model, finding out the best output for the next 48 h. Third, in the experimental part, we use the test set to check the performance of the proposed CNN-BiLSTM-Attention on PM2.5 prediction, which is compared by other comparison models, i.e., lasso regression, ridge regression, XGBOOST, SVR, CNN-LSTM, and CNN-BiLSTM. We conduct short-term prediction (48 h) and long-term prediction (72 h, 96 h, 120 h, 144 h), respectively. The results demonstrate that even the predictions of the next 144 h with CNN-BiLSTM-Attention is better than the predictions of the next 48 h with the comparison models in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and coefficient of determination (R2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider water surface object detection in natural scenes. Generally, background subtraction and image segmentation are the classical object detection methods. The former is highly susceptible to variable scenes, so its accuracy will be greatly reduced when detecting water surface objects due to the changing of the sunlight and waves. The latter is more sensitive to the selection of object features, which will lead to poor generalization as a result, so it cannot be applied widely. Consequently, methods based on deep learning have recently been proposed. The River Chief System has been implemented in China recently, and one of the important requirements is to detect and deal with the water surface floats in a timely fashion. In response to this case, we propose a real-time water surface object detection method in this paper which is based on the Faster R-CNN. The proposed network model includes two modules and integrates low-level features with high-level features to improve detection accuracy. Moreover, we propose to set the different scales and aspect ratios of anchors by analyzing the distribution of object scales in our dataset, so our method has good robustness and high detection accuracy for multi-scale objects in complex natural scenes. We utilized the proposed method to detect the floats on the water surface via a three-day video surveillance stream of the North Canal in Beijing, and validated its performance. The experiments show that the mean average precision (MAP) of the proposed method was 83.7%, and the detection speed was 13 frames per second. Therefore, our method can be applied in complex natural scenes and mostly meets the requirements of accuracy and speed of water surface object detection online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban road intersection bottleneck has become an important factor in causing traffic delay and restricting traffic efficiency. It is essential to explore the prediction of the operating performance at intersections in real-time and formulate corresponding strategies to alleviate intersection delay. However, because of the sophisticated intersection traffic condition, it is difficult to capture the intersection traffic Spatio-temporal features by the traditional data and prediction methods. The development of big data technology and the deep learning model provides us a good chance to address this challenge. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-task fusion deep learning (MFDL) model based on massive floating car data to effectively predict the passing time and speed at intersections over different estimation time granularity. Moreover, the grid model and the fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering method are developed to identify the intersection area and derive a set of key Spatio-temporal traffic parameters from floating car data. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, the floating car data from ten intersections of Beijing with a sampling rate of 3s are adopted for the training and test process. The experiment result shows that the MFDL model enables us to capture the Spatio-temporal and topology feature of the traffic state efficiently. Compared with the traditional prediction method, the proposed model has the best prediction performance. The interplay between these two targeted prediction variables can significantly improve prediction accuracy and efficiency. Thereby, this method predicts the intersection operation performance in real-time and can provide valuable insights for traffic managers to improve the intersection's operation efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning provides a promising approach for air pollution prediction. The existing deep learning-based predicted models generally consider either the temporal correlations of air quality monitoring stations or the nonlinear relationship between the PM2.5 (particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of less than 2.5 μm) concentrations and explanatory variables. Spatial correlation has not been effectively incorporated into prediction models, therefore exhibiting poor performance in PM2.5 prediction tasks. Additionally, determining the manner by which to expand longer-term prediction tasks is still challenging. In this paper, to allow for spatiotemporal correlations, a spatiotemporal convolutional recursive long short-term memory (CR-LSTM) neural network model is proposed for predicting the PM2.5 concentrations in long-term prediction tasks by combining a convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) neural network and a recursive strategy. Herein, the ConvLSTM network was used to capture the complex spatiotemporal correlations and to predict the future PM2.5 concentrations; the recursive strategy was used for expanding the long-term prediction tasks. The CR-LSTM model was used to realize the prediction of the future 24 h of PM2.5 concentrations for 12 air quality monitoring stations in Beijing by configuring both the appropriate time lag derived from the temporal correlations and the spatial neighborhood, including the hourly historical PM2.5 concentrations, the daily mean meteorological data, and the annual nighttime light and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The results showed that the proposed CR-LSTM model achieved better performance (coefficient of determination (R2) = 0.74; root mean square error (RMSE) = 18.96 μg/m3) than other common models, such as multiple linear regression (MLR), support vector regression (SVR), the conventional LSTM model, the LSTM extended (LSTME) model, and the temporal sliding LSTM extended (TS-LSTME) model. The proposed CR-LSTM model, implementing a combination of geographical rules, recursive strategy, and deep learning, shows improved performance in longer-term prediction tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trend prediction based on sensor data in a multi-sensor system is an important topic. As the number of sensors increases, we can measure and store more and more data. However, the increase in data has not effectively improved prediction performance. This paper focuses on this problem and presents a distributed predictor that can overcome unrelated data and sensor noise: First, we define the causality entropy to calculate the measurement's causality. Then, the series causality coefficient (SCC) is proposed to select the high causal measurement as the input data. To overcome the traditional deep learning network's over-fitting to the sensor noise, the Bayesian method is used to obtain the weight distribution characteristics of the sub-predictor network. A multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is constructed as the fusion layer to fuse the results from different sub-predictors. The experiments were implemented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by meteorological data from Beijing. The results show that the proposed predictor can effectively model the multi-sensor system's big measurement data to improve prediction performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The segmentation of high-resolution (HR) remote sensing images is very important in modern society, especially in the fields of industry, agriculture and urban modelling. Through the neural network, the machine can effectively and accurately extract the surface feature information. However, using the traditional deep learning methods requires plentiful efforts in order to find a robust architecture. In this paper, we introduce a neural network architecture search (NAS) method, called NAS-HRIS, which can automatically search neural network architecture on the dataset. The proposed method embeds a directed acyclic graph (DAG) into the search space and designs the differentiable searching process, which enables it to learn an end-to-end searching rule by using gradient descent optimization. It uses the Gumbel-Max trick to provide an efficient way when drawing samples from a non-continuous probability distribution, and it improves the efficiency of searching and reduces the memory consumption. Compared with other NAS, NAS-HRIS consumes less GPU memory without reducing the accuracy, which corresponds to a large amount of HR remote sensing imagery data. We have carried out experiments on the WHUBuilding dataset and achieved 90.44% MIoU. In order to fully demonstrate the feasibility of the method, we made a new urban Beijing Building dataset, and conducted experiments on satellite images and non-single source images, achieving better results than SegNet, U-Net and Deeplab v3+ models, while the computational complexity of our network architecture is much smaller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficient and accurate application of deep learning in the remote sensing field largely depends on the pre-processing technology of remote sensing images. Particularly, image fusion is the essential way to achieve the complementarity of the panchromatic band and multispectral bands in high spatial resolution remote sensing images. In this paper, we not only pay attention to the visual effect of fused images, but also focus on the subsequent application effectiveness of information extraction and feature recognition based on fused images. Based on the WorldView-3 images of Tongzhou District of Beijing, we apply the fusion results to conduct the experiments of object recognition of typical urban features based on deep learning. Furthermore, we perform a quantitative analysis for the existing pixel-based mainstream fusion methods of IHS (Intensity-Hue Saturation), PCS (Principal Component Substitution), GS (Gram Schmidt), ELS (Ehlers), HPF (High-Pass Filtering), and HCS (Hyper spherical Color Space) from the perspectives of spectrum, geometric features, and recognition accuracy. The results show that there are apparent differences in visual effect and quantitative index among different fusion methods, and the PCS fusion method has the most satisfying comprehensive effectiveness in the object recognition of land cover (features) based on deep learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]