Search

This paper introduces RapidScat 2.5-km ultrahigh-resolution (UHR) wind estimation and validates it in near-coastal regions. RapidScat UHR wind estimation provides finer resolution ocean wind vector fields than conventional 12.5-km level 2B (L2B) wind products at a cost of higher noise. In addition, this paper applies direction interval retrieval techniques and develops other wind processing improvements to enhance the performance of RapidScat UHR wind estimation. The new algorithm is validated with L2B wind estimates, numerical weather prediction wind products, and buoy measurements. The wind processing improvements produce more spatially consistent UHR winds that compare well with the wind products mentioned above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of an acoustic glider to perform acoustical meteorology. This discipline consists of analyzing ocean ambient noise to infer above-surface meteorological conditions. The paper focuses on wind speed estimation, in a near-shore marine environment. In such a shallow water context, the ambient noise field is complex, with site-dependent factors and a variety of nonweather concurrent acoustic sources. A conversion relationship between sound pressure level and wind speed is proposed, taking the form of an outlier-robust nonlinear regression model learned with in situ data. This method is successfully applied to experimental data collected in Massachusetts Bay (MA, USA) during four glider surveys. An average error in wind speed estimation of 1.3 m · s−1 (i.e., average relative error of 14%) over wind speed values up to 17 m · s−1 is reported with this method, which outperformed results obtained with relationships from the literature. Quantitative results are also detailed on the dependence of wind speed error estimation on the environment characteristics, and on the classification performance of observations contaminated by acoustic sources other than wind. Passive acoustic-based weather systems are a promising solution to provide long-term in situ weather data with fine time and spatial resolutions. These data are crucial for satellite calibration and assimilation in meteorological models. From a broader perspective, this paper is the first step toward an operationalization of acoustic weather systems and their on-board embedding in underwater monitoring platforms such as gliders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear spectral unmixing is the practice of decomposing the mixed pixel into a linear combination of the constituent endmembers and the estimated abundances. This paper focuses on unsupervised spectral unmixing where the endmembers are unknown a priori. Conventional approaches use either geometrical- or statistical-based approaches. In this paper, we address the challenges of spectral unmixing with unsupervised deep learning models, in specific, the autoencoder models, where the decoder serves as the endmembers and the hidden layer output serves as the abundances. In several recent attempts, part-based autoencoders have been designed to solve the unsupervised spectral unmixing problem. However, the performance has not been satisfactory. In this paper, we first discuss some important findings we make on issues with part-based autoencoders. By proof of counterexample, we show that all existing part-based autoencoder networks with nonnegative and tied encoder and decoder are inherently defective by making these inappropriate assumptions on the network structure. As a result, they are not suitable for solving the spectral unmixing problem. We propose a so-called untied denoising autoencoder with sparsity, in which the encoder and decoder of the network are independent, and only the decoder of the network is enforced to be nonnegative. Furthermore, we make two critical additions to the network design. First, since denoising is an essential step for spectral unmixing, we propose to incorporate the denoising capacity into the network optimization in the format of a denoising constraint rather than cascading another denoising preprocessor in order to avoid the introduction of additional reconstruction error. Second, to be more robust to the inaccurate estimation of a number of endmembers, we adopt an $l_{21}$ -norm on the encoder of the network to reduce the redundant endmembers while decreasing the reconstruction error simultaneously. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, especially for highly noisy data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the detection, from a stack of repeated-pass interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, of such changes causing a target to completely lose the correlation between one epoch and another. This can be the consequence of human activities, such as construction, destruction, and agricultural activities, and also be the consequence of hazards, such as earthquake, landslides, or flooding, to buildings or terrains. The millimetric sensitivity of SAR makes it valuable for detecting such changes. This paper approaches two coherent change detection methods: a space coherent, time incoherent one and a full space and time coherent one, both based on the generalized likelihood ratiob (LR) test. A preliminary validation of the method is provided by processing two Sentinel-1 data stacks of 2016 Central Italy earthquake and by comparing the results with the map of damaged buildings in Amatrice and Accumoli made by Copernicus Emergency Management Service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the compensation of phase miscalibration in the general context of tomographic synthetic aperture radar image focusing. Phase errors are typically independent of one acquisition to the other, thus leading to a spreading and defocusing in the multidimensional (3-D, 4-D, and 5-D) imaging space. Coping with this problem in presence of volumetric scattering is generally a complex issue. In this paper, we consider the approach for phase calibration characterized by the advantage, with respect to classical phase calibration algorithms, of not requiring either the identification of a reference target or specific assumptions about the unknown phase function, or a priori information about the terrain topography. The novelty of the proposed phase miscalibration estimation and compensation method is related to its ability to avoid unwanted and uncontrollable vertical shifts in the focused image. The estimation of the calibration phase is performed by optimizing the contrast or the entropy of the vertical profile with the constraint of a zero phase derivative. Such a constraint preserves the output height distribution. Experimental results of simulated and real data are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate estimation of within-footprint slope is very important for measuring earth’s surface characteristics using satellite light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. Several models have previously been proposed for slope estimation; however, these models have limitations in either accuracy or applicability. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of various factors (e.g., ground vertical extent, footprint size, footprint shape, and footprint orientation) on slope estimation to better estimate the within-footprint slope using large-footprint waveform LiDAR data. The results indicated that the absolute slope error due to the coupling effect of ground vertical extent and footprint size increased with an increase in the ratio of ground vertical extent and footprint size, while the relative slope error had an opposite trend. The slope error caused by footprint shape was relatively low when the footprint eccentricity was small. However, the slope error due to footprint shape grew rapidly when the footprint eccentricity became larger; thus, it is essential to fully take into account the influence of footprint shape on within-footprint slope estimation. In addition, the results suggest that the slope error changed regularly based on the intersection angle between footprint orientation and terrain aspect. This paper also provided guidance for the determination of an easy and practical model for within-footprint slope estimation. The determination of best model is dependent on the value of intersection angle. Once the intersection value is given, the best model can easily be determined. Using the best model, the within-footprint terrain slope can be estimated with high accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similar to the conventional squint mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging processing, the estimation of Doppler centroid is one key problem for the low-squint-mode (within the range of [−5°, 5°]) multichannel in an azimuth high-resolution and wide-swath (HRWS) SAR system. In this paper, based on the electromagnetic scattering model, a novel weighted Doppler centroid estimation approach is proposed for the multichannel in the azimuth HRWS (MC-HRWS) SAR system. First, Maxwell’s equations are employed to derive the echo model for the multichannel SAR system. Then, an improved backscattering model is presented based on the small perturbation method and the available echo model, which is adopted to produce the weights for Doppler centroid estimation. More importantly, in order to improve the precision of Doppler centroid estimation, a weighted ambiguity-free Doppler centroid estimation approach is proposed, where the range-variant characteristic of Doppler centroid is employed to resolve the ambiguity number of Doppler centroid, and the echoes from different range bins with different signal-to-noise ratios are considered. In addition, the Cramer–Rao low bound of the estimated Doppler centroid is also discussed in this paper. The effectiveness of the proposed Doppler centroid estimation approach is verified via simulated and real measured low-squint-mode MC-HRWS SAR data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrestrial laser scanning is a promising tool for estimating leaf angle (including leaf inclination and azimuthal angles) distribution (LAD). However, previous studies focus on the retrieval of leaf inclination angle distribution, very few studies have considered the distribution of leaf azimuthal angle due to the restriction of measurement techniques. In this paper, we developed a new method to obtain more accurate leaf inclination and azimuthal angle estimations based on leaf point cloud segmentation and filtration and then fit LAD functions using two-parameter Beta-distribution model. In addition, we constructed a new projection coefficient model with two parameters $G(\theta $ , $\varphi$) using Nilson’s algorithm based on the accurate retrieval of LAD. To assess the influence of leaf numbers on leaf inclination and azimuthal angle estimations, we modeled 160 individual leaves and 10 trees with different leaf numbers. In addition, to validate the final results, we also sampled three magnolia trees with different leaf numbers and manually measured leaf inclination and azimuthal angles of all their leaves using an angle measurement device. All results showed that the method proposed in this paper can provide accurate leaf inclination and azimuthal angles (leaf inclination angle: $R^{2} = 0.98$ , RMSE = 24° and leaf azimuthal angle: $R^{2} = 0.99$ , RMSE = 3.44°). The simulated LAD and $G(\theta $ , $\varphi$) estimations based on these leaf inclination and azimuthal angles were strongly correlated with those obtained from ground truth measurements ($P >0.05$). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of information fusion has gained a widespread interest in many fields due to its complementary properties. It makes systems more robust against uncertainty. This paper presents a new approach for the well-logging estimation problem by using a fusion methodology. The natural gammaray tool (NGT) is considered as an important instrument in the well logging. The NGT detects changes in natural radioactivity emerging from the variations in concentrations of micronutrients as uranium (U), thorium (Th), and potassium (K). The main goal of this paper is to have precise estimation of the concentrations of U, Th, and K. Four types of Kalman filters are designed to estimate the elements using the NGT sensor. Then, a fusion of the Kalman filters is utilized into an integrated framework by an ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator to enhance the quality of the estimations. A real covariance of the output error based on the innovation matrix is utilized to design weighting factors for the OWA operator. The simulation studies indicate not only a reliable performance of the proposed method compared with the individual Kalman filters but also a better response in contrast with previous fusion methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to achieve computationally efficient and high-accuracy subpixel image registration with large displacements under the rotation–scale–translation model. This paper employs the classical phase correlation algorithm and the Lucas–Kanade (LK) algorithm in a two-stage coarse-to-fine framework, for which the motivation is from the observation that the two algorithms exhibit strong complementary property between convergence range and subpixel accuracy. In this framework, the LK algorithm will also become computationally efficient owing to the small residual displacement. On the other hand, this paper takes into account the residual model with respect to the compensation scheme explicitly, and deduces formulas for the final results combination, which is expected to be closer to the true displacement vector and thus further improve the estimation accuracy. Since the compensation can be applied to either the target image or the reference image, two algorithms are presented accordingly, and analysis as well as comparison are also performed. Finally, both simulations and real image experiments are performed to verify the motivation, and the results are consistent with the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Remote sensing images play important roles in various earth surface observation applications. However, the hazy state of surface atmosphere can visually decrease the contrast and availability of remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a haze and thin cloud removal method for single visible remote sensing images, which aims to robustly estimate haze thickness, atmospheric light, and transmission value from a remote sensing image with dense haze or thin cloud, and finally recovers a haze-free image. An elliptical boundary prior (EBP) is proposed to transform the haze thickness in each local patch from the pixels cluster in the spectral space, which is surrounded by an ellipse. With the aim of preventing highlight objects influences, an atmospheric light estimation approach is presented. The correlation of transmission and haze thickness is reconstructed to develop the scattering model for remote sensing images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can not only significantly improve the contrast and restore textures of various kinds of hazy remote sensing images but also well preserve the spectral information of visible bands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pixel selection is a crucial step of all advanced Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) techniques that have a direct impact on the quality of the final DInSAR products. In this paper, a full-resolution phase quality estimator, i.e., the temporal phase coherence (TPC), is proposed for DInSAR pixel selection. The method is able to work with both distributed scatterers (DSs) and permanent scatterers (PSs). The influence of different neighboring window sizes and types of interferograms combinations [both the single-master (SM) and the multi-master (MM)] on TPC has been studied. The relationship between TPC and phase standard deviation (STD) of the selected pixels has also been derived. Together with the classical coherence and amplitude dispersion methods, the TPC pixel selection algorithm has been tested on 37 VV polarization Radarsat-2 images of Barcelona Airport. Results show the feasibility and effectiveness of TPC pixel selection algorithm. Besides obvious improvements in the number of selected pixels, the new method shows some other advantages comparing with the other classical two. The proposed pixel selection algorithm, which presents an affordable computational cost, is easy to be implemented and incorporated into any advanced DInSAR processing chain for high-quality pixels’ identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time-consuming modeling of physical remote sensing models restricts their application to parameter estimation from satellite observations. Machine learning techniques have become highly developed in recent years and show good capacity for model fitting. Based on our previously developed coupled soil–canopy–atmosphere radiative transfer model (RTM) and a multiple parameters estimation scheme, this paper evaluates the performance of four machine learning algorithms [Gaussian process regression (GPR), back-propagation neural networks (NNs), random forest regression, and general regression NN] on emulating the coupled RTM, where the traditional lookup table (LUT) algorithm is also compared. The results show that the GPR algorithm can emulate complex RTMs with excellent accuracy and efficiency. GPR emulators of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), fraction of absorbed PAR, and incident shortwave radiation were applied to the multi-parameter estimation scheme to replace the traditional LUT algorithm, which avoids the need to integrate over the spectra while achieving an acceleration ratio of 16. A test of the updated multi-parameter estimation scheme at the Bondville site using 18 years of clear-sky observations demonstrates that replacing the computationally expensive integration processes with GPR emulators is practical. The emulators can also be used to simulate the corresponding parameters independently, and this GPR acceleration method for complex models is universal and can be easily applied to other time-consuming models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For numerous applications in image registration, sub-pixel translation estimation is a fundamental task, and increasing attention has been given to methods based on image phase information. However, we have found that none of these methods is universal. In other words, for any one of these methods, we can always find some image pairs which will not be well matched. In this paper, by introducing the cyclic shift matrix (CSM), we present a new model for the translation matching problem and derive a least squares solution for the model. In addition, by repeatedly applying the CSM to the matching image, an iterative CSM method is proposed to further improve the matching accuracy. Furthermore, we show that the traditional phase-based matching algorithms can only achieve an exact solution when there is a cyclic shift relationship between the images to be matched. The proposed method is evaluated using simulated and real images and demonstrates a better performance in both accuracy and robustness compared with the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rotational parameter estimation is fundamental to the focusing of imaging algorithm and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image size calibration. Previous research has indicated that scattering points (SPs) in different imaging time windows locate at various associated positions in range-Doppler (RD) planes. This paper exploits the relation to estimate the rotation parameters (RPs) and translation error parameters for medium processing time length and nonuniform rotation situation. The iterative closet point (ICP) method inspires an alternating iterative algorithm consisting of the SP assignment and parameter optimization. In the parameter optimization step, multiple SP set pairs are utilized to construct the objective function that represents the degree of mismatch between point set pairs. A compatible fast SP extracting method is also presented to reduce the computational complexity. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can provide fast, accurate, and robust estimation for parameters in nonuniform rotation case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional remote sensing observation can only derive chlorophyll-a concentration in surface water (Chlasurf), which is insufficient for water quality monitoring or biogeochemical applications. In this paper, a column-integrated biomass (CIB) estimation algorithm was established in Lake Dianchi, China, and the CIB was estimated by Ocean and Land Color Instrument (OLCI) data from 2016 to 2018. First, the results show that the method is applicable to CIB estimation in nonbloom conditions [mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) = 10.55%, mean ratio (MR) = 0.996]. On the one hand, Chlasurf could be estimated using a universal model of Chla (UMOC) estimation for case-II waters; on the other hand, CIB could be obtained from Chlasurf according to the linear relationship between the Chlasurf and CIB. Second, both the spatial and temporal variabilities of Chlasurf are larger than those of CIB, which indicates that the biomass of the whole lake is relatively stable from day to day. During algal bloom periods, the CIB at nonbloom areas tends to decrease, suggesting that algae from nonbloom regions have migrated to bloom regions. Third, wind speed (WS) is the most critical meteorological factor affecting the water surface biomass, compared with other parameters. The average percentage of surface-to-total biomass in nonbloom conditions is about 7% when the WS is less than 2 m/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capon’s minimum-variance method (MVM) and amplitude and phase estimation (APES) spectral estimation algorithms can be applied to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing to improve the resolution and suppress sidelobe levels. In this paper, we use Capon-/APES-based SAR reprocessing algorithms to increase the persistent scatterer (PS) density in PS interferometry (PSI). We propose a PS candidate (PSC) selection algorithm applicable to the superresolution reprocessed images and the corresponding processing chain. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by a number of simulations and a stack of TerraSAR-X data. The results show that the Capon algorithm outperforms others in PSC selection. We present a full PSI time-series analysis on the PSCs extracted from the Capon-reprocessed stacks. The results show that the PS density is increased between 50% and 60%, while their interferometric quality is maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the predictive understanding of satellite precipitation estimation errors over complex terrain, which is fundamental to the development of error models for improving hydrological applications. This paper focuses on the Trentino-Alto Adige region of the eastern Italian Alps. Rainfall observations over a 10-year period (2000–2009) from a dense rain gauge network in the region are used as reference precipitation. A number of satellite precipitation error properties (probability of detection, false alarm rates, missed events, spatial correlation of the error, and hit biases) are investigated in terms of seasonality, satellite algorithm, rainfall intensity, gauge density, and temporal resolution dependencies. These error parameters are typically used in error models (e.g., SREM2D) and provide the basis for enhancing error scheme development. Three widely used satellite-based precipitation products are employed: 1) the Climate Prediction Center morphing product; 2) the precipitation estimation from remotely sensed imagery using artificial neural networks; and 3) the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission multisatellite precipitation analysis 3B42 near-real-time product. The three products show similar performances, with larger errors during the warm season, characterized by convective storms, and less variability in the cold season, characterized by more organized stratiform systems. Lower biases are depicted at the daily scale with respect to the 3-hourly resolution. The SREM2D error model has the ability to correct the satellite precipitation products, even though attention is needed for potential systematic errors when applying the calibrated model to independent periods or regions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sea ice concentration (SIC) is an important sea ice parameter for sea ice navigation, environmental research, and weather and ice forecasting. We have developed and tested a method for estimation of the Baltic Sea SIC using SENTINEL-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 passive microwave radiometer (MWR) data. Here, we present the method and results for January 2016. Ice concentration grids of Finnish Meteorological Institute daily ice charts have been used as reference data in this paper. We present a comparison of four SIC estimation methods with our reference data. In addition to the combined SAR/MWR SIC estimation method, we also compare SIC estimates produced using SAR alone and two MWR-based methods. The main target of this paper was to develop and test a high-resolution SIC estimation method suitable for operational use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wind profilers (WPs) are a special category of ground-based radar instruments used to obtain 3-D profile of wind velocity along the altitude in atmosphere. They transmit radio wave pulses in very high frequency (VHF) or ultrahigh frequency (UHF) bands in vertical and near-vertical directions. The Doppler frequency shift and the time of flight of the echo signals from each beam are measured. These data are analyzed to get the radial velocities of atmospheric targets at all the ranges. The data must be processed from at least three noncoplanar beam directions together to estimate 3-D wind profile. The signal-to-noise ratio is very low for the higher range target echoes. Also, echoes are often contaminated by nonatmospheric signals like clutter, radio frequency interference, and so on. Determining accurate wind profile, especially at higher heights, becomes a challenging task due to these factors. This paper presents a novel algorithm for the estimation of radial velocity profile by processing the set of Doppler power spectra of all range bins. The algorithm identifies prospective atmospheric echoes components. Then it forms velocity profile trails connecting five range bins. The program rejects the profile trails that show velocity change higher than a predefined limit. The remaining trails are evaluated using a specially designed multiparameter cost function (MPCF). The trails with maximum cost are selected and then connected to construct the complete Doppler profile or the radial velocity profile. The key innovation in this method is an improvised function that is created by weighted addition of two terms. The first term is proportional to the signal power, and the second term is a nonlinear function of differential wind shear. This algorithm has been tried on multiple sets of the Indian mesosphere–stratosphere–troposphere radar data and the lower atmospheric WP radar data. The performance of this method is compared with other methods, namely, the adaptive moment estimation method and fuzzy logic approach. It has been observed that the new method shows excellent consistency in extracting the Doppler profile from the power spectral data. This method requires at least 30% lesser computations compared with other methods. The results of the MPCF method showed a very good match with the data obtained from concurrently operated Global Positioning System sonde, an independent wind profiling method. This paper also shows the results on the performance improvement using power spectra from the symmetrical beams. This algorithm shows a great promise as a tool for automatic Doppler profile tracing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents spiking neural networks (SNNs) for remote sensing spatiotemporal analysis of image time series, which make use of the highly parallel and low-power-consuming neuromorphic hardware platforms possible. This paper illustrates this concept with the introduction of the first SNN computational model for crop yield estimation from normalized difference vegetation index image time series. It presents the development and testing of a methodological framework which utilizes the spatial accumulation of time series of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer 250-m resolution data and historical crop yield data to train an SNN to make timely prediction of crop yield. The research work also includes an analysis on the optimum number of features needed to optimize the results from our experimental data set. The proposed approach was applied to estimate the winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) yield in Shandong province, one of the main winter-wheat-growing regions of China. Our method was able to predict the yield around six weeks before harvest with a very high accuracy. Our methodology provided an average accuracy of 95.64%, with an average error of prediction of 0.236 t/ha and correlation coefficient of 0.801 based on a nine-feature model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we consider the parameter estimation of $K$ -Gaussians, given convex combinations of their realizations. In the remote sensing literature, this setting is known as the normal compositional model (NCM) and has shown promising gains in modeling hyperspectral images. Current NCM parameter estimation techniques are based on Bayesian methodology and are computationally slow and sensitive to their prior assumptions. Here, we introduce a deterministic variant of the NCM, named DNCM, which assumes that the unknown mixing coefficients are nonrandom. This leads to a standard Gaussian model with a simple estimation procedure, which we denote by $K$ -Gaussians. Its iterations are provided in closed form and do not require any sampling schemes or simplifying structural assumptions. We illustrate the performance advantages of $K$ -Gaussians using synthetic and real images, in terms of accuracy and computational costs in comparison to state of the art. We also demonstrate the use of our algorithm in hyperspectral target detection on a real image with known targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the separation of the height between the ground subsidence phase components and the atmospheric phase delay mixed in the global SAR interferometry (InSAR) phase information is an issue of primary concern in the remote sensing community. This paper describes a complete procedure to address the challenge to estimate the atmospheric phase screen and to separate the three-phase components by exploiting only one InSAR image couple. This solution has the capability to process persistent scatterers subsidence maps potentially using only two multitemporal InSAR couples observed in any atmospheric condition. The solution is obtained by emulating the atmosphere compensation technique that is largely used by the global positioning system where two frequencies are used in order to estimate and compensate the positioning errors due to atmosphere parameters’ variations. A sub-chirping and sub-Doppler algorithm for atmospheric compensation is proposed, which allows the successful separation of the height from the subsidence and the atmosphere parameters from the interferometric phase observed on one InSAR couple. The results are given processing images of two InSAR couples observed by the COSMO-SkyMed satellite system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-cover classification with hyperspectral imagery has been an active topic in the remote sensing community. It aims at relating a unique class label to each pixel in the scene, so that it can be well defined by a given land cover type. In this paper, we explore the intrinsic characteristics of hyperspectral imagery from a subpixel-level perspective and propose a new subpixel component analysis (SCA) approach for feature extraction and land-cover classification. The core idea of SCA is that we extract a subpixel attribute component feature from the abundance maps. Compared with the abundance maps, the extracted subpixel feature image shows higher signal-to-noise level and clearer spatial distribution details. In order to deal with spectral variability, as well as obtain representative image endmember signatures and their corresponding abundance maps, we adopt a regional clustering-based spatial preprocessing (RCSPP) strategy for endmember identification, and a partial unmixing model based on mixture tuned matched filtering (MTMF) for abundance estimation. Furthermore, to highlight the spatial distribution details as well as eliminate the noise disturbance in the derived abundance maps, we perform sparse image decomposition on the obtained abundance maps, thus achieving a new subpixel feature representation for classification. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed SCA approach can obtain feature representation with explicit physical meaning, clear spatial distribution details, and better noise robustness, leading to state-of-the-art classification results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wave–current interaction is a common and important phenomenon in the ocean. As an ocean remote sensing tool, high-frequency (HF) radar can be used to measure currents and wave parameters. In this paper, the possibility of studying wave–current interaction using HF radar is investigated. The first-order spectral power (FSP) of HF radar is used to explore the effect of current on the Bragg wave. By analyzing the FSP change with current (FSP-current distribution), we find that, in deep water, the wave–current interactions mainly belong to 2-D refraction case, while, over a relatively shallow shelf, the interactions are stronger and more complicated. Based on local topography and current field data at Taiwan Strait, the simulation results obtained using the SWAN model confirm the 2-D refraction of the Bragg wave. When the wave–current interaction is stable, we compensate the FSP with radar-measured currents according to the radar extracted FSP-current distribution and achieve a more accurate wind estimation. Comparisons between the original and refined wind fields show the effectiveness and necessity of the current-based compensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a spherically invariant random vector (SIRV)-based dual-domain filter for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) speckle suppression. The SIRV model is a simple clutter decomposition model designed for heterogeneous scenes that decomposes the clutter into two independent domains: the texture domain and the polarimetric domain (also known as the speckle domain). The dual-domain filter takes full advantage of the SIRV model to decompose the task of PolSAR speckle suppression into polarimetric domain filtering and texture domain filtering. The polarimetric domain filtering involves estimating a stable state of the normalized coherency matrix with similar samples via fixed-point iteration. For this purpose, the nonlocal patch matching distance measure and the cutoff threshold in the SIRV model case are defined to select similar samples. The texture domain filtering involves reconstructing a sparse texture image without the effect of speckle. For this purpose, patch ordering-based SAR image despeckling via transform-domain filtering (SAR-POTDF), which is based on simultaneous sparse coding (SSC), is applied for the texture filtering. After the dual-domain filtering, a speckle-free PolSAR image can be reconstructed by the product of the texture and the normalized coherency matrix. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method was demonstrated by experiments undertaken with CETC-38 X-band, DLR F-SAR S-band, and IECAS C-band high-resolution PolSAR images. The DLR E-SAR L-band medium-resolution data were also used for comparison. The results showed that the dual-domain filtering is effective for the speckle suppression of high-resolution PolSAR images with heterogeneous and detailed scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space–time adaptive processing (STAP) of multichannel radar data is an established and powerful method for detecting ground moving targets, as well as for estimating their geographical positions and line-of-sight velocities. Crucial steps for practical applications are: 1) the appropriate and automatic selection of the training data and 2) the periodic update of these data to take into account the change of the clutter statistics over space and time. Improper training data and contamination by moving target signals may result in a decreased clutter suppression performance, an incorrect constant false alarm rate threshold, and target cancelation by self-whitening. In this paper, two conventional and two novel methods for training data selection are evaluated and compared using real four-channel X-band radar data acquired with DLR’s airborne sensor F-SAR. In addition, a module for rejecting potential moving target signals and strong scatterers from the training data is proposed and discussed. All methods are evaluated for a conventional post-Doppler (PD) STAP processor and for a particular PD STAP that uses an a priori known road map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for 3-D rain field reconstruction using satellite signals. It uses the estimated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the ground receivers for low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites and, thus, indirectly estimates the path-integrated rain attenuation of the microwave communication links. A least-squares algorithm is employed to perform the 3-D tomographic reconstruction of the rain field. The proposed system model consists of an LEO satellite with a realistic overpass trajectory and multiple ground receivers with SNR estimators. Two synthetic rain events near the Great Barrier Reef in Australia are used to test the reconstruction outcome. Simulation results suggest that the reconstructed rain field has close agreement with the synthetic rain field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with atmospheric correction in hyperspectral data acquired in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) spectral range. Atmospheric compensation (AC) is approached from a new perspective in that it is reformulated as an estimation problem on a low-rank subspace. Specifically, a subspace-based model is exploited to represent both the atmospheric transmittance and the upwelling radiance. Taking into account the inherent correlation between these two quantities, we adopt a subspace model that constrains them to vary in a physically consistent way. Exploiting such a model, AC is formulated as a nonlinear least-squares estimation problem. An automatic procedure is proposed to estimate the unknown parameters, which is based only on the image analysis and does not need any atmospheric measurements. Results of an extensive experimental analysis carried out on simulated data are used to discuss the performance of the algorithm with respect to different atmospheric conditions. Finally, experimental evidence over a real LWIR hyperspectral image is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient multitemporal despeckling method. The key idea of the proposed approach is the use of the ratio image, provided by the ratio between an image and the temporal mean of the stack. This ratio image is easier to denoise than a single image thanks to its improved stationarity. Besides, temporally stable thin structures are well preserved thanks to the multitemporal mean. The proposed approach can be divided into three steps: 1) estimation of a “superimage” by temporal averaging and possibly spatial denoising; 2) denoising of the ratio between the noisy image of interest and the “superimage”; and 3) computation of the denoised image by remultiplying the denoised ratio by the “superimage.” Because of the improved spatial stationarity of the ratio images, denoising these ratio images with a speckle-reduction method is more effective than denoising images from the original multitemporal stack. The amount of data that is jointly processed is also reduced compared to other methods through the use of the “superimage” that sums up the temporal stack. The comparison with several state-of-the-art reference methods shows better results numerically (peak signal-noise-ratio and structure similarity index) as well as visually on simulated and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) time series. The proposed ratio-based denoising framework successfully extends single-image SAR denoising methods to time series by exploiting the persistence of many geometrical structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) azimuth cutoff method is thoroughly revised and a new and general implementation is proposed. The key roles of the pixel spacing, the size of the image box, and the texture of the SAR scene are analyzed and optimized in terms of azimuth cutoff ($\lambda _{\mathrm{ c}}$) estimation. The reliability of the $\lambda _{\mathrm{ c}}$ estimation is analyzed by measuring the distance between the measured and fitted autocorrelation functions. This analysis shows that it is of paramount importance to filter unfeasible/unreliable $\lambda _{\mathrm{ c}}$ values. To identify those values in an objective way, a criterion that is based on the $\chi _{2}$ test performed over a large data set of Sentinel-1 SAR imagery is defined and proven to be effective. The new robust implementation of the $\lambda _{\mathrm{ c}}$ estimation at about 1-km grid spacing is then used to produce averaged $\lambda _{\mathrm{ c}}$ at about 10-km grid spacing. The performance of the new estimation procedure, analyzed using a $\lambda _{\mathrm{ c}}$ -to-wind-speed forward model, is shown to provide improved wind speed retrievals, with a root-mean-square error of 1.8–2 m/s when verified against independent numerical weather prediction model output and scatterometer winds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-precision parameter estimation is crucial for micromotion feature acquisitions. A method of high-precision range estimation based on phase of wideband radar echo is proposed in this paper. After the proposed processing, unwrapped signal phases without any ambiguity can be obtained to calculate the relative range of the target. No constraint condition for phase ambiguity resolution is imposed on the proposed method, which means that it could still work well in low signal-to-noise ratio situations. Cramér–Rao lower bound for the root-mean-squared error of the range estimation is derived in analytical expression. Results of several simulations and experiment with FEKO generated data are presented to show the effectiveness and antinoise performance of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the analysis of airborne laser scanning (ALS) data often provides reliable estimates for certain forest stand attributes-such as total volume or basal area-there is still room for improvement, especially in estimating species-specific attributes. Moreover, while the information on the estimate uncertainty would be useful in various economic and environmental analyses on forests, a computationally feasible framework for uncertainty quantifying in ALS is still missing. In this paper, the species-specific stand attribute estimation and uncertainty quantification (UQ) is approached using Gaussian process regression (GPR), which is a nonlinear and nonparametric machine learning method. Multiple species-specific stand attributes are estimated simultaneously: tree height, stem diameter, stem number, basal area, and stem volume. The cross-validation results show that GPR yields on average an improvement of 4.6% in estimate root mean square error over a state-of-the-art $k$ -nearest neighbors (kNNs) implementation, negligible bias and well performing UQ (credible intervals), while being computationally fast. The performance advantage over kNN and the feasibility of credible intervals persists even when smaller training sets are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The absence of systematic estimates of vertical transport of water by convective storms is one of the main causes of uncertainties in weather forecasting in the tropics, in severe weather forecasting, and in the climate-scale analysis and prediction of global circulation. The difficulty of providing such estimates lies in that the only instruments capable of providing such estimates at present, radiometers onboard satellites, operate at short wavelengths, and that makes difficult the retrievals. This paper describes a method capable of providing robust estimates of the maximum height of precipitation and the 3-D structure of condensed water in convective systems using a constellation of radiometers. Using hurricane Winston and the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission Core Observatory satellite dual precipitation radar as a reference, it is shown that the method is suitable to improve the parameterization of convection in numerical models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio frequency interference (RFI) causes serious problems to ultrawideband (UWB) radar operations due to severely degrading radar imaging capability and target detection performance. This paper formulates proper data models and proposes novel methods for effective RFI mitigation. We first apply the single-snapshot Sparse Iterative Covariance-based Estimation (SPICE) algorithm to data from each pulse repetition interval for RFI mitigation and discuss the connection of SPICE to the $l_{1}$ -penalized least absolute deviation ($l_{1}$ -PLAD) approach. Then, we devise a modified group SPICE algorithm and we prove that it is equivalent to a special case of the $l_{1,2}$ -PLAD method. The modified group SPICE algorithm can be applied to data from a coherent processing interval for effective RFI mitigation. Both the single-snapshot SPICE and the modified group SPICE methods simultaneously exploit the sparsity properties of both RFI spectrum and UWB radar target echoes. Unlike the existing sparsity-based RFI suppression methods, such as the robust principal component analysis algorithm, the proposed methods are hyperparameter-free and therefore easier to use in practical applications. Furthermore, the fast implementation of the SPICE methods is considered by exploiting the special structures of both single-snapshot and multiple-snapshot covariance matrices. Finally, the results obtained from applying the SPICE methods to simulated data as well as measured data collected by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory synthetic aperture radar system are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tomographic synthetic aperture radar (TomoSAR) inversion of urban areas is an inherently sparse reconstruction problem and, hence, can be solved using compressive sensing (CS) algorithms. This paper proposes solutions for two notorious problems in this field. First, TomoSAR requires a high number of data sets, which makes the technique expensive. However, it can be shown that the number of acquisitions and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be traded off against each other, because it is asymptotically only the product of the number of acquisitions and SNR that determines the reconstruction quality. We propose to increase SNR by integrating nonlocal (NL) estimation into the inversion and show that a reasonable reconstruction of buildings from only seven interferograms is feasible. Second, CS-based inversion is computationally expensive and therefore, barely suitable for large-scale applications. We introduce a new fast and accurate algorithm for solving the NL L1-L2-minimization problem, central to CS-based reconstruction algorithms. The applicability of the algorithm is demonstrated using simulated data and TerraSAR-X high-resolution spotlight images over an area in Munich, Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partial least-squares (PLS) regression is a popular method for modeling chemical constituents from spectroscopic data and has been widely applied to retrieve leaf chemical components via hyperspectral remote sensing. However, one persistent challenge for applying the PLS regression is the selection of informative spectral bands among the vast array of acquired spectra. No consensus has been reached yet on how to select informative bands regardless of many techniques being proposed. In this paper, we have composited four individual data sets containing a total of 598 leaf samples from various species to evaluate four different band elimination/selection methods. Results revealed that the stepwise-PLS approach was optimal to estimate leaf chlorophyll content even under different spectral resolutions, from which informative bands were identified. Informative bands, in general, include bands inside the near-infrared (NIR), and in addition, one within the blue range and one within the red range. With such combinations, the PLS regression models meet the requirement for accurate leaf chlorophyll estimation. For most PLS regression models, their accuracies decreased with the reduction of spectral resolution, but the stepwise-PLS approach could consistently estimate the chlorophyll content at different spectral resolutions (with ${R}^{2} \ge 0.77$ for resolutions < 20 nm). The findings, hence, provide valuable insights for selecting informative spectral bands for PLS analysis and lay a strong foundation for retrieving foliar biochemical content using hyperspectral remote sensing data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information on soil available nutrient (SAN) at key crop growth stages is critical to generate prescription maps for implementing variable rate fertilization (VRF). Our previous study showed that integrating time-series remote sensing (RS) data with the modified World Food Studies (WOFOST) crop model provides a useful approach (preliminary RS-WOFOST-based method) to acquiring information on field SAN; however, the estimation accuracy was low for VRF application. In this paper, three steps were proposed to further improve the SAN estimation accuracy. At the first step, the rapid-nutrient assimilation (RNA) method was used to optimize the crop growth simulation process. Compared with the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) method, the RNA method showed an improved performance in estimating soil available nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) content [EnKF: $R^{2} = 0.48$ (N), 0.37 (P), 0.15 (K); RNA: $R^{2} = 0.59$ (N), 0.46 (P), and 0.18 (K)]. The improved K estimation at the first step was clearly lower than that of N and P; hence, the K content estimation was further optimized at the second step and the accuracy was improved ($R^{2} = 0.27$) by using the estimated N as an input variable during the K estimation. At the third step, an iteration algorithm was implemented based on the first two steps, and the final $R^{2} = 0.71$ (N), 0.58 (P), 0.49 (K); root-mean-square error = 14.35 (N), 3.70 (P), and 14.87 (K). In general, the optimized approach can overcome the limitations of the preliminary RS-WOFOST-based method and improve the SAN estimation accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpolation based on prediction-error filter (PEF) is one of the most effective approaches recently proposed for seismic data reconstruction. However, the number of effective regression equations for estimating the filter coefficients will be much less when missing many seismic traces, which makes the estimated filter coefficients inaccurate or even impossible to be estimated. To improve the accuracy of filter coefficients, in this paper, we design a multiscale and multidirectional PEF, in which the number of effective regression equations can be increased much more, and use it to seismic data reconstruction. First, we estimate the adaptive different directional PEFs using the known data in different scales. The known data can be regularly sampled with randomly or regularly missing, or even both of them. Then, we interpolate missing seismic traces using estimated PEF and the sparse known traces. The regularization in least-squares inversion controls the adaptivity of multiscale multidirectional PEF. The use of more effective regression equations in inversion makes the filter coefficients more accurate. In addition, the multiscale filter can conveniently deal with the case of the simultaneous existence of randomly and regularly missing, while the conventional methods have to be treated separately for randomly and regularly missing. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are examined by synthetic and field data examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral unmixing has attracted much attention in recent years. Single sparse unmixing assumes that a pixel in a hyperspectral image consists of a relatively small number of spectral signatures from large, ever-growing, and available spectral libraries. Joint-sparsity (or row-sparsity) model typically enforces all pixels in a neighborhood to share the same set of spectral signatures. The two sparse models are widely used in the literature. In this paper, we propose a joint-sparsity-blocks model for abundance estimation problem. Namely, the abundance matrix of size $m\times n$ is partitioned to have one row block and $s$ column blocks and each column block itself is joint-sparse. It generalizes both the single (i.e., $s=n$) and the joint (i.e., $s=1$) sparsities. Moreover, concatenating the proposed joint-sparsity-blocks structure and low rankness assumption on the abundance coefficients, we develop a new algorithm called joint-sparse-blocks and low-rank unmixing. In particular, for the joint-sparse-blocks regression problem, we develop a two-level reweighting strategy to enhance the sparsity along the rows within each block. Simulated and real-data experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rain-gauge-adjusted algorithm for global satellite mapping of precipitation (GSMaP) that estimates the surface precipitation rate with resolutions of 0.1° and 1 h over the globe is described herein. Precipitation is one of the most important parameters of the earth’s system, and its global distribution and changes are essential data for modeling the water cycle, maintaining ecosystems, increasing agricultural production, improving weather forecasting precision, and implementing flood warning systems. In the Global Precipitation Measurement project, integrated products of high-resolution mapping of precipitation, obtained from microwave measurements made by a constellation satellite and infrared radiometers in geostationary orbit, are developed and supplied to the public. However, these high-resolution products, such as GSMaP_MVK, sometimes underestimate surface precipitation, introducing large errors into hydrological modeling. This paper combines the global gauge data set with GSMaP_MVK, using a new algorithm [gauge-adjusted GSMaP (GSMaP_Gauge)], described and evaluated herein using local radar and rain-gauge data sets. This algorithm outperforms other GSMaP products in all validation tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atmospheric motion vectors (AMVs) estimation helps in better understanding of atmospheric dynamics and also plays a key role in weather forecasting. It has been a challenging task because of the nonrigid motion of clouds and cyclones. In this paper, a modified Weighted Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter-based data assimilation technique is proposed for accurate flow vector estimation at each pixel directly from satellite generated infrared images of clouds/cyclones. This method provides clear visualization of both local and global motion with spatial and temporal consistencies very efficiently even in the case of splitting and merging of clouds or over long tracks. One of the key abilities of proposed method is in forecasting applications and also for generating motion vectors in the absence of data in real scenarios, even without the usage of the existing complex weather models. Estimated AMVs are validated using state-of-the-art European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) analysis data, and cyclone tracks are validated using the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) best track data. The results obtained demonstrate the efficacy of proposed method over other existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global navigation satellite system reflectometry (GNSS-R) is a new remote sensing technique, which can be used to measure a wide range of geophysical parameters. GNSS-R makes use of the simultaneous reception of the direct transmission and the coherent surface reflections of the GNSS signal with either a single antenna or multiple separate antennas. This paper presents a new snow depth estimation method using a combination of pseudorange and carrier phase of GNSS dual-frequency signals. The proposed method is geometry-free and is not affected by ionospheric delays. The formulas of the amplitude attenuation factor of reflected signals, multipath-induced carrier-phase error, and pesudorange error for ground-based GNSS receivers are used to describe the combined signals. Using theoretical formulas instead of in situ measurement data, analytical linear models are established in advance to describe the relationship between snow depth and main frequency of combined signal time series. When the main frequency of the combined measurements is obtained by spectrum analysis, the model is used to determine snow depth. Two experimental data sets recorded in two different environments were used to test the proposed method. The results demonstrate that there exists good agreement between the proposed method and the ground-truth measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relationships between vegetation indices (VIs) and leaf area index (LAI) tend to saturate in the nadir direction, and vary with crop canopy structure and view zenith angles (VZAs). The objective of this paper was to improve the monitoring accuracy and angular stability of VIs for estimating LAI using multiangular remote sensing data. The relationship between LAI and ground-based hyperspectral spectral reflectance was quantified in winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) exhibiting erectophile and planophile growth habits. To further reduce the saturation, species specificity, and angular sensitivity, we developed a saturation factor (SF), based on near-infrared and green bands. Multiplying all VIs by SF greatly improved the association with LAI across all VZAs ($R^{2} = 0.73{-}0.82$). Most VI $\times$ SF values, particularly optimized soil-adjusted VI $\times$ SF, were able to construct universal algorithms across VZAs for accurate estimation of LAI due to the sensitivity of SF to LAI in a dense canopy, and the insensitivity of SF to view effects with larger VZAs. This approach is also promising for the exploitation of multiangular satellite data for the design and calibration of nonview-angle-corrected spectral reflectance, for which the sensor is only deployed at fixed observation direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an in-depth study concerning the development of a sea state bias (SSB) model designed with three parameters exclusively derived from altimeter data and globally applied to all reference altimeter missions. The proposed technique, first tested for the Jason-1 mission, proves to have a good performance for a wide range of ocean conditions when compared with the state-of-the-art SSB corrections currently in use. In addition to the significant wave height ($H_{s}$) and wind speed ($U~_{{10}}$), a third predictor acting as a mediator parameter gathered by the mean wave period ($T_{z}$) has been used. Two different empirical algorithms for altimeter ocean wave period have been tested and implemented, improving the SSB model performance in some ocean regions. The methodology relies on nonparametric modulation and statistical techniques based on smoothing splines embedded in a generalized additive model. This SSB modeling approach shows good performance when applied to all reference missions, in particular to TOPEX and Jason-2 missions, slightly reducing the explained variance of sea-level anomaly (SLA) when compared with the established SSB models. The approach is computationally efficient, capable of generating a stable SSB model using a small training data set when little information is available, as is the case with the recent Jason-3 mission. Model performance is assessed by comparison with existing SSB corrections for each reference mission, intercomparisons during the period of the tandem phases, and by SLA variance analysis, providing a consistent set of SSB corrections for the four reference missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GaoFen1 is the first high-resolution earth observation satellite built in China, and carries four wide field-of-view (WFV) cameras to achieve large-scale monitoring and mapping. However, the unstable attitude measurement accuracy of the satellite generally imparts low geopositioning accuracy and inconsistent geometric error in overlapping areas of WFV images. A feasible and effective large-scale planar block adjustment (PBA) method is presented that corrects the geometric errors of the vast WFV images integrally, further improving the geometric accuracy of these images. In addition, whether ground control points (GCPs) are needed, and the effect of different numbers of GCPs on PBA accuracy is also investigated. Two key technologies are used in this paper. First, a universal PBA error equation based on the virtual control points is presented to allow PBA with or without GCPs. Second, an adjustment method aided by a digital elevation model is adopted to overcome the weak convergence geometry among WFV images, further ensuring stable estimation of PBA. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by 664 WFV images covering most of mainland China. The satisfactory experimental results indicate that the method presented herein is reasonable and effective, but that a certain number of GCPs is needed to ensure the accuracy of large-scale PBA results for WFV images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extended common midpoint (XCMP) method can be used on multichannel 3-D ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to estimate the asphalt pavement thickness and dielectric constant without the need for calibration by taking cores. The XCMP method requires accurate time delay determination of pavement reflection. However, for thin asphalt overlay, the range resolution of 3-D GPR signal is insufficient to resolve the overlapped pulses of asphalt concrete (AC). The objective of this paper is to use multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm to increase the resolution of 3-D GPR signals, such that thin asphalt overlay thickness can be accurately estimated. An evaluation of the MUSIC algorithm at a full-scale test section and a comparison with regularized deconvolution algorithm showed the MUSIC algorithm is an effective approach for increasing the 3-D GPR signal range resolution when the XCMP method is applied on thin AC overlay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) attempts to find optimal models of subsurface by using full information of the observed data. One difficulty in conventional FWI is that the misfit function has many local minima because of cycle skipping. Envelope inversion (EI), which uses the envelope operator (EO)-based misfit function, has been proven to be effective in mitigating cycle skipping and recovering long-wavelength velocity model. However, EI ignores the fact that the information within different frequency bands plays different roles in inversion. In this paper, a frequency controllable EO, which can control the frequency components being used to construct envelope, is proposed. We propose a new misfit function and a multiscale FWI method. Using synthetic experiments based on the Marmousi model, we demonstrate that the proposed method is better than EI in mitigating cycle skipping and in building an accurate initial model for conventional FWI to significantly improve its final result. In addition, this method can tolerate a wide range of noise levels. Its effectiveness has also been successfully demonstrated using a field data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate building rooftop extraction from high-resolution aerial images is of crucial importance in a wide range of applications. Owing to the varying appearance and large-scale range of scene objects, especially for building rooftops in different scales and heights, single-scale or individual prior-based extraction technique is insufficient in pursuing efficient, generic, and accurate extraction results. The trend toward integrating multiscale or several cue techniques appears to be the best way; thus, such integration is the focus of this paper. We first propose a novel salient rooftop detector integrating four correlative RGB-D priors (depth cue, uniqueness prior, shape prior, and transition surface prior) for improved rooftop extraction to address the preceding complex issues mentioned. Then, these correlative cues are computed from image layers created by our multilevel segmentation and further fused into the state-of-the-art high-order conditional random field (CRF) framework to locate the rooftop. Finally, an iterative optimization strategy is applied for high-quality solving, which can robustly handle varying appearance of building rooftops. Performance evaluations in the SZTAKI-INRIA benchmark data sets show that our method outperforms the traditional color-based algorithm and the original high-order CRF algorithm and its variants. The proposed algorithm is also evaluated and found to produce consistently satisfactory results for various large-scale, real-world data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data heterogeneity can pose a great challenge to process and systematically fuse low-level data from different modalities with no recourse to heuristics and manual adjustments and refinements. In this paper, a new methodology is introduced for the fusion of measured data for detecting and predicting weather-driven natural hazards. The proposed research introduces a robust theoretical and algorithmic framework for the fusion of heterogeneous data in near real time. We establish a flexible information-based fusion framework with a target optimality criterion of choice, which for illustration, is specialized to a maximum entropy principle and a least effort principle for semisupervised learning with noisy labels. We develop a methodology to account for multimodality data and a solution for addressing inherent sensor limitations. In our case study of interest, namely, that of flood density estimation, we further show that by fusing remote sensing and social media data, we can develop well founded and actionable flood maps. This capability is valuable in situations where environmental hazards, such as hurricanes or severe weather, affect very large areas. Relative to the state of the art working with such data, our proposed information-theoretic solution is principled and systematic, while offering a joint exploitation of any set of heterogeneous sensor modalities with minimally assuming priors. This flexibility is coupled with the ability to quantitatively and clearly state the fusion principles with very reasonable computational costs. The proposed method is tested and substantiated with the multimodality data of a 2013 Boulder Colorado flood event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]