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The growing adoption of electric propulsion systems in Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASSs) necessitates advancements in shipboard electronics for safe, efficient, and reliable operation. These advancements are crucial for tasks such as real-time sensor data processing, control algorithms for autonomous navigation, and robust decision-making capabilities. This study investigates research trends in MASSs, using bibliographic analysis to identify policy and future research directions in this evolving field. We analyze 3363 MASS-related articles from the Web of Science database, employing co-occurrence word analysis and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling. The findings reveal a rapidly growing field dominated by image recognition research. Keywords such as "datum", "image", and "detection" suggest a focus on collecting and analyzing marine data, particularly with deep learning for synthetic aperture radar imagery. LDA confirms this, with "image analysis and classification research" as the leading topic. The study also identifies national and organizational leaders in MASS research. However, research on Arctic routes lags behind that on other areas. This work provides valuable insights for policymakers and researchers, promoting a deeper understanding of MASSs and informing future policy and research agendas regarding the integration of electric propulsion systems within the maritime industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document explores the significance of remote sensing in monitoring maritime activities and identifying vessels. It emphasizes the need for surveillance to ensure safety, security, and emergency management, given the increasing number of vessels worldwide. The document highlights the use of technologies like the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and remote sensing in situations where collaborative systems are not reliable. It also discusses the integration of data from different sensors and the application of data science techniques for a comprehensive assessment of maritime traffic. The document concludes by summarizing research papers on ship detection, tracking, and classification using various sensors and data processing techniques. [Extracted from the article]

Generative adversarial networks (or GANs) are a specific deep learning architecture often used for different usages, such as data generation or image-to-image translation. In recent years, this structure has gained increased popularity and has been used in different fields. One area of expertise currently in vogue is the use of GANs to produce synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, and especially expand training datasets for SAR automatic target recognition (ATR). In effect, the complex SAR image formation makes these kind of data rich in information, leading to the use of deep networks in deep learning-based methods. Yet, deep networks also require sufficient data for training. However, contrary to optical images, we generally do not have a substantial number of available SAR images because of their acquisition and labelling cost; GANs are then an interesting tool. Concurrently, how to improve explainability for SAR ATR deep neural networks and how to make their reasoning more transparent have been increasingly explored as model opacity deteriorates trust of users. This paper aims at reviewing how GANs are used with SAR images, but also giving perspectives on how GANs could be used to improve interpretability and explainability of SAR classifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, deep learning has found widespread application in SAR image object detection. However, when detecting multi-scale targets against complex backgrounds, these models often struggle to strike a balance between accuracy and speed. Furthermore, there is a continuous need to enhance the performance of current models. Hence, this paper proposes LRMSNet, a new multi-scale target detection model designed specifically for SAR images in complex backgrounds. Firstly, the paper introduces an attention module designed to enhance contextual information aggregation and capture global features, which is integrated into a backbone network with an expanded receptive field for improving SAR image feature extraction. Secondly, this paper develops an information aggregation module to effectively fuse different feature layers of the backbone network. Lastly, to better integrate feature information at various levels, this paper designs a multi-scale aggregation network. We validate the effectiveness of our method on three different SAR object detection datasets (MSAR-1.0, SSDD, and HRSID). Experimental results demonstrate that LRMSNet achieves outstanding performance with a mean average accuracy (mAP) of 95.2%, 98.9%, and 93.3% on the MSAR-1.0, SSDD, and HRSID datasets, respectively, with only 3.46 M parameters and 12.6 G floating-point operation cost (FLOPs). When compared with existing SAR object detection models on the MSAR-1.0 dataset, LRMSNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, showcasing its superiority in addressing SAR detection challenges in large-scale complex environments and across various object scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As artificial intelligence technology advances, the application of object detection technology in the field of SAR (synthetic aperture radar) imagery is becoming increasingly widespread. However, it also faces challenges such as resource limitations in spaceborne environments and significant uncertainty in the intensity of interference in application scenarios. These factors make the performance evaluation of object detection key to ensuring the smooth execution of tasks. In the face of such complex and harsh application scenarios, methods that rely on single-dimensional evaluation to assess models have had their limitations highlighted. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-dimensional evaluation method for deep learning models used in SAR image object detection. This method evaluates models in a multi-dimensional manner, covering the training, testing, and application stages of the model, and constructs a multi-dimensional evaluation index system. The training stage includes assessing training efficiency and the impact of training samples; the testing stage includes model performance evaluation, application-based evaluation, and task-based evaluation; and the application stage includes model operation evaluation and model deployment evaluation. The evaluations of these three stages constitute the key links in the performance evaluation of deep learning models. Furthermore, this paper proposes a multi-indicator comprehensive evaluation method based on entropy weight correlation scaling, which calculates the weights of each evaluation indicator through test data, thereby providing a balanced and comprehensive evaluation mechanism for model performance. In the experiments, we designed specific interferences for SAR images in the testing stage and tested three models from the YOLO series. Finally, we constructed a multi-dimensional performance profile diagram for deep learning object detection models, providing a new visualization method to comprehensively characterize model performance in complex application scenarios. This can provide more accurate and comprehensive model performance evaluation for remote sensing data processing, thereby guiding model selection and optimization. The evaluation method proposed in this study adopts a multi-dimensional perspective, comprehensively assessing the three core stages of a model's lifecycle: training, testing, and application. This framework demonstrates significant versatility and adaptability, enabling it to transcend the boundaries of remote sensing technology and provide support for a wide range of model evaluation and optimization tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The airborne and satellite-based synthetic aperture radar enables the acquisition of high-resolution SAR oceanographic images in which even the outlines of ships can be identified. The detection of ship targets from SAR images has a wide range of applications. Due to the density of ships in SAR images, the extreme imbalance between foreground and background clutter, and the diversity of target sizes, achieving lightweight and highly accurate multi-scale ship target detection remains a great challenge. To this end, this paper proposed an attention mechanism for multi-scale receptive fields convolution block (AMMRF). AMMRF not only makes full use of the location information of the feature map to accurately capture the regions in the feature map that are useful for detection results, but also effectively captures the relationship between the feature map channels, so as to better learn the relationship between the ship and the background. Based on this, a new YOLOv7-based ship target detection method, You Only Look Once SAR Ship Identification (YOLO-SARSI), was proposed, which acquires the abstract semantic information extracted from the high-level convolution while retaining the detailed semantic information extracted from the low-level convolution. Compared to the deep learning detection methods proposed by previous authors, our method is more lightweight, only 18.43 M. We examined the effectiveness of our method on two SAR image public datasets: the High-Resolution SAR Images Dataset (HRSID) and the Large-Scale SAR Ship Detection Dataset-v1.0 (LS-SSDD-V1.0). The results show that the average accuracy ( A P 50 ) of the detection method YOLO-SARSI proposed in this paper on the HRSID and LS-SSDD-V1.0 datasets is 2.6% and 3.9% higher than that of YOLOv7, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data, in deep learning (DL), are crucial to detect ships in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. However, SAR image annotation limitations hinder DL-based SAR ship detection. A novel data-selection method and teacher–student model are proposed in this paper to effectively leverage sparse labeled data and improve SAR ship detection performance, based on the semi-supervised oriented object-detection (SOOD) framework. More specifically, we firstly propose a SAR data-scoring method based on fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE), and discuss the relationship between the score distribution of labeled data and detection performance. A refined data selector (RDS) is then designed to adaptively obtain reasonable data for model training without any labeling information. Lastly, a Gaussian Wasserstein distance (GWD) and an orientation-angle deviation weighting (ODW) loss are introduced to mitigate the impact of strong scattering points on bounding box regression and dynamically adjusting the consistency of pseudo-label prediction pairs during the model training process, respectively. The experiments results on four open datasets have demonstrated that our proposed method can achieve better SAR ship detection performances on low-proportion labeled datasets, compared to some existing methods. Therefore, our proposed method can effectively and efficiently reduce the burden of SAR ship data labeling and improve detection capacities as much as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ship detection is a significant issue in remote sensing based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). This paper combines the advantages of a steady constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector and a knowledge-oriented Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) classifier to achieve the location and the classification of ship candidates. The steady CFAR detector smooths the image by a moving-average filter and models the probability distribution of the smoothed clutter as a Gaussian distribution. The mean and the standard deviation of the Gaussian distribution are estimated according to the left half of the histogram to remove the effect of land, ships, and other targets. From the Gaussian distribution and a preset constant false alarm rate, a threshold is obtained to segment land, ships, and other targets from the clutter. Then, a series of morphological operations are introduced to eliminate land and extract ships and other targets, and an active contour algorithm is utilized to refine ships and other targets. Finally, ships are recognized from other targets by a knowledge-oriented GBDT classifier. Based on the brain-like ship-recognition process, we change the way of the decision-tree generation and achieve a higher classification performance than the original GBDT. The results on the AIRSARShip-1.0 dataset demonstrate that this scheme has a competitive performance against deep learning, especially in the detection of offshore ships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SAR (synthetic aperture radar) ship detection is a hot topic due to the breadth of its application. However, limited by the volume of the SAR image, the generalization ability of the detector is low, which makes it difficult to adapt to new scenes. Although many data augmentation methods—for example, clipping, pasting, and mixing—are used, the accuracy is improved little. In order to solve this problem, the adversarial training is used for data generation in this paper. Perturbation is added to the SAR image to generate new samples for training, and it can make the detector learn more abundant features and promote the robustness of the detector. By separating batch normalization between clean samples and disturbed images, the performance degradation on clean samples is avoided. By simultaneously perturbing and selecting large losses of classification and location, it can keep the detector adaptable to more confrontational samples. The optimization efficiency and results are improved through K-step average perturbation and one-step gradient descent. The experiments on different detectors show that the proposed method achieves 8%, 10%, and 17% AP (Average Precision) improvement on the SSDD, SAR-Ship-Dataset, and AIR-SARShip, compared to the traditional data augmentation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficient and timely identification of oil spill areas is crucial for ocean environmental protection. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is widely used in oil spill detection due to its all-weather monitoring capability. Meanwhile, existing deep learning-based oil spill detection methods mainly rely on the classical U-Net framework and have achieved impressive results. However, SAR images exhibit high noise, blurry boundaries, and irregular shapes of target areas, as well as speckles and shadows, which lead to the loss of performance in existing algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel network architecture to achieve more precise segmentation of oil spill areas by reintroducing rich semantic contextual information before obtaining the final segmentation mask. Specifically, the proposed architecture can re-fuse feature maps from different levels at the decoder end. We design a multi-convolutional layer (MCL) module to extract basic feature information from SAR images, and a feature extraction module (FEM) module further extracts and fuses feature maps generated by the U-Net decoder at different levels. Through these operations, the network can learn rich global and local contextual information, enable sufficient interaction of feature information at different stages, enhance the model's contextual awareness, and improve its ability to recognize complex textures and blurry boundaries, thereby enhancing the segmentation accuracy of SAR images. Compared to many U-Net based segmentation networks, our method shows promising results and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple evaluation metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polarimetric features extracted from polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images contain abundant back-scattering information about objects. Utilizing this information for PolSAR image classification can improve accuracy and enhance object monitoring. In this paper, a deep learning classification method based on polarimetric channel power features for PolSAR is proposed. The distinctive characteristic of this method is that the polarimetric features input into the deep learning network are the power values of polarimetric channels and contain complete polarimetric information. The other two input data schemes are designed to compare the proposed method. The neural network can utilize the extracted polarimetric features to classify images, and the classification accuracy analysis is employed to compare the strengths and weaknesses of the power-based scheme. It is worth mentioning that the polarized characteristics of the data input scheme mentioned in this article have been derived through rigorous mathematical deduction, and each polarimetric feature has a clear physical meaning. By testing different data input schemes on the Gaofen-3 (GF-3) PolSAR image, the experimental results show that the method proposed in this article outperforms existing methods and can improve the accuracy of classification to a certain extent, validating the effectiveness of this method in large-scale area classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The utilization of deep learning in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) has witnessed a recent surge owing to its remarkable feature extraction capabilities. Nonetheless, deep learning methodologies are often encumbered by inadequacies in labeled data and the protracted nature of training processes. To address these challenges and offer an alternative avenue for accurately extracting image features, this paper puts forth a novel and distinctive network dubbed the Capsule Broad Learning System Network for robust SAR ATR (CBLS-SARNET). This novel strategy is specifically tailored to cater to small-sample SAR ATR scenarios. On the one hand, we introduce a United Division Co-training (UDC) Framework as a feature filter, adeptly amalgamating CapsNet and the Broad Learning System (BLS) to enhance network efficiency and efficacy. On the other hand, we devise a Parameters Sharing (PS) network to facilitate secondary learning by sharing the weight and bias of BLS node layers, thereby augmenting the recognition capability of CBLS-SARNET. Experimental results unequivocally demonstrate that our proposed CBLS-SARNET outperforms other deep learning methods in terms of recognition accuracy and training time. Furthermore, experiments validate the generalization and robustness of our novel method under various conditions, including the addition of blur, Gaussian noise, noisy labels, and different depression angles. These findings underscore the superior generalization capabilities of CBLS-SARNET across diverse SAR ATR scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate estimation of forest aboveground biomass is of great significance for forest management and carbon balance monitoring. Remote sensing instruments have been widely applied in forest parameters inversion with wide coverage and high spatiotemporal resolution. In this paper, the capability of different remote-sensed imagery was investigated, including multispectral images (GaoFen-6, Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8) and various SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data (GaoFen-3, Sentinel-1, ALOS-2), in aboveground forest biomass estimation. In particular, based on the forest inventory data of Hangzhou in China, the Random Forest (RF), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Convolutional Neural Networks Long Short-Term Memory Networks (CNN-LSTM) algorithms were deployed to construct the forest biomass estimation models, respectively. The estimate accuracies were evaluated under the different configurations of images and methods. The results show that for the SAR data, ALOS-2 has a higher biomass estimation accuracy than the GaoFen-3 and Sentinel-1. Moreover, the GaoFen-6 data is slightly worse than Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 optical data in biomass estimation. In contrast with the single source, integrating multisource data can effectively enhance accuracy, with improvements ranging from 5% to 10%. The CNN-LSTM generally performs better than CNN and RF, regardless of the data used. The combination of CNN-LSTM and multisource data provided the best results in this case and can achieve the maximum R2 value of up to 0.74. It was found that the majority of the biomass values in the study area in 2018 ranged from 60 to 90 Mg/ha, with an average value of 64.20 Mg/ha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building change detection (BCD) plays a vital role in city planning and development, ensuring the timely detection of urban changes near metro lines. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has the advantage of providing continuous image time series with all-weather and all-time capabilities for earth observation compared with optical remote sensors. Deep learning algorithms have extensively been applied for BCD to realize the automatic detection of building changes. However, existing deep learning-based BCD methods with SAR images suffer limited accuracy due to the speckle noise effect and insufficient feature extraction. In this paper, an attention-guided dual-branch fusion network (ADF-Net) is proposed for urban BCD to address this limitation. Specifically, high-resolution SAR images collected by TerraSAR-X have been utilized to detect building changes near metro line 8 in Shanghai with the ADF-Net model. In particular, a dual-branch structure is employed in ADF-Net to extract heterogeneous features from radiometrically calibrated TerraSAR-X images and log ratio images (i.e., difference images (DIs) in dB scale). In addition, the attention-guided cross-layer addition (ACLA) blocks are used to precisely locate the features of changed areas with the transformer-based attention mechanism, and the global attention mechanism with the residual unit (GAM-RU) blocks is introduced to enhance the representation learning capabilities and solve the problems of gradient fading. The effectiveness of ADF-Net is verified using evaluation metrics. The results demonstrate that ADF-Net generates better building change maps than other methods, including U-Net, FC-EF, SNUNet-CD, A2Net, DMINet, USFFCNet, EATDer, and DRPNet. As a result, some building area changes near metro line 8 in Shanghai have been accurately detected by ADF-Net. Furthermore, the prediction results are consistent with the changes derived from high-resolution optical remote sensing images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have explored various methods to fully exploit the all-weather characteristics of Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to achieve high-precision, real-time, computationally efficient, and easily deployable ship target detection models. These methods include Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) algorithms and deep learning approaches such as RCNN, YOLO, and SSD, among others. While these methods outperform traditional algorithms in SAR ship detection, challenges still exist in handling the arbitrary ship distributions and small target features in SAR remote sensing images. Existing models are complex, with a large number of parameters, hindering effective deployment. This paper introduces a YOLOv7 oriented bounding box SAR ship detection model (YOLOv7oSAR). The model employs a rotation box detection mechanism, uses the KLD loss function to enhance accuracy, and introduces a Bi-former attention mechanism to improve small target detection. By redesigning the network's width and depth and incorporating a lightweight P-ELAN structure, the model effectively reduces its size and computational requirements. The proposed model achieves high-precision detection results on the public RSDD dataset (94.8% offshore, 66.6% nearshore), and its generalization ability is validated on a custom dataset (94.2% overall detection accuracy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a methodology to detect the coastal erosion and progradation effects in the 'Atrato River' delta, located in the Gulf of Urabá in Colombia, using SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) images. Erosion is the physical–mechanical loss of the soil that affects its functions and ecosystem services while producing a reduction in its productive capacity. Progradation is the deposition of layers in the basinward direction while moving coastward. Other studies have investigated these two phenomena using optical images, encountering difficulties due to the persistent presence of clouds in this region. In order to avoid the cloud effects, in this study, we used 16 Sentinel 1 SAR images with two different polarizations between 2016 and 2023. First, each image was rescaled from 0 to 255, then the image was despeckled by a deep learning (DL) model. Afterwards, a single RGB image was composed with the filtered polarizations. Next, a classifier with 99% accuracy based on Otsu's method was used to determine whether each pixel was water or not. Then, the classified image was registered to a reference one using Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) descriptor. Finally, a multitemporal analysis was performed by comparing every image to the previous one to identify the studied phenomena, calculating areas. Also, all images were integrated to obtain a heatmap that showed the overall changes across eight years (2016–2023) in a single image. The multitemporal analysis performed found that the newly created mouth is the most active area for these processes, coinciding with other studies. In addition, a comparison of these findings with the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) showed a relative delayed coupling to the erosion process and a coupling of progradation with dry and wet seasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the complex imaging mechanism of SAR images and the lack of multi-angle and multi-parameter real scene SAR target data, the generalization performance of existing deep-learning-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image target detection methods are extremely limited. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain-adaptive SAR ship detection method based on cross-domain feature interaction and data contribution balance. First, we designed a new cross-domain image generation module called CycleGAN-SCA to narrow the gap between the source domain and the target domain. Second, to alleviate the influence of complex backgrounds on ship detection, a new backbone using a self-attention mechanism to tap the potential of feature representation was designed. Furthermore, aiming at the problems of low resolution, few features and easy information loss of small ships, a new lightweight feature fusion and feature enhancement neck was designed. Finally, to balance the influence of different quality samples on the model, a simple and efficient E 1 2 I o U Loss was constructed. Experimental results based on a self-built large-scale optical-SAR cross-domain target detection dataset show that compared with existing cross-domain methods, our method achieved optimal performance, with the mAP reaching 68.54%. Furthermore, our method achieved a 6.27% improvement compared to the baseline, even with only 5% of the target domain labeled data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the large volume of remote sensing images collected daily, automatic object detection and segmentation have been a consistent need in Earth observation (EO). However, objects of interest vary in shape, size, appearance, and reflecting properties. This is not only reflected by the fact that these objects exhibit differences due to their geographical diversity but also by the fact that these objects appear differently in images collected from different sensors (optical and radar) and platforms (satellite, aerial, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)). Although there exists a plethora of object detection methods in the area of remote sensing, given the very fast development of prevalent deep learning methods, there is still a lack of recent updates for object detection methods. In this paper, we aim to provide an update that informs researchers about the recent development of object detection methods and their close sibling in the deep learning era, instance segmentation. The integration of these methods will cover approaches to data at different scales and modalities, such as optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, and digital surface models (DSM). Specific emphasis will be placed on approaches addressing data and label limitations in this deep learning era. Further, we survey examples of remote sensing applications that benefited from automatic object detection and discuss future trends of the automatic object detection in EO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) ship detection is applicable to various scenarios, such as maritime monitoring and navigational aids. However, the detection process is often prone to errors due to interferences from complex environmental factors like speckle noise, coastlines, and islands, which may result in false positives or missed detections. This article introduces a ship detection method for SAR images, which employs deep learning and morphological networks. Initially, adaptive preprocessing is carried out by a morphological network to enhance the edge features of ships and suppress background noise, thereby increasing detection accuracy. Subsequently, a coordinate channel attention module is integrated into the feature extraction network to improve the spatial awareness of the network toward ships, thus reducing the incidence of missed detections. Finally, a four-layer bidirectional feature pyramid network is designed, incorporating large-scale feature maps to capture detailed characteristics of ships, to enhance the detection capabilities of the network in complex geographic environments. Experiments were conducted using the publicly available SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) and High-Resolution SAR Image Dataset (HRSID). Compared with the baseline model YOLOX, the proposed method increased the recall by 3.11% and 0.22% for the SSDD and HRSID, respectively. Additionally, the mean Average Precision (mAP) improved by 0.7% and 0.36%, reaching 98.47% and 91.71% on these datasets. These results demonstrate the outstanding detection performance of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring ships on water surfaces encounters obstacles such as weather conditions, sunlight, and water ripples, posing significant challenges in accurately detecting target ships in real time. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers a viable solution for real-time ship detection, unaffected by cloud coverage, precipitation, or light levels. However, SAR images are often affected by speckle noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and water surface ripple interference. This study introduces LCAS-DetNet, a Multi-Location Cross-Attention Ship Detection Network tailored for the ships in SAR images. Modeled on the YOLO architecture, LCAS-DetNet comprises a feature extractor, an intermediate layer ("Neck"), and a detection head. The feature extractor includes the computation of Multi-Location Cross-Attention (MLCA) for precise extraction of ship features at multiple scales. Incorporating both local and global branches, MLCA bolsters the network's ability to discern spatial arrangements and identify targets via a cross-attention mechanism. Each branch utilizes Multi-Location Attention (MLA) and calculates pixel-level correlations in both channel and spatial dimensions, further combating the impact of salt-and-pepper noise on the distribution of objective ship pixels. The feature extractor integrates downsampling and MLCA stacking, enhanced with residual connections and Patch Embedding, to improve the network's multi-scale spatial recognition capabilities. As the network deepens, we consider this structure to be cascaded and multi-scale, providing the network with a richer receptive field. Additionally, we introduce a loss function based on Wise-IoUv3 to address the influence of label quality on the gradient updates. The effectiveness of our network was validated on the HRSID and SSDD datasets, where it achieved state-of-the-art performance: a 96.59% precision on HRSID and 97.52% on SSDD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geological and topographic conditions in the upper reaches of the Jinsha River are intricate, with frequent occurrences of landslides. Landslide Susceptibility Prediction (LSP) in this area is a crucial aspect of geological disaster risk management. This study constructs an LSP model using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based on a Bilateral Aggregation Guidance (BAG) strategy, termed BGA-Net. A comprehensive landslide hazard analysis, integrating static landslide susceptibility zonation with dynamic surface deformation monitoring, was therefore conducted. The study area selected was the upper reaches of the Jinsha River, particularly the site of the Baige landslide. The BGA-Net model was first proposed for LSP generation, achieving an accuracy exceeding 85%, while the Small Baseline Subset Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SBAS-InSAR) technology was jointly applied to comprehensively analyze the dynamic geological hazard risk at a regional scale. The final results were presented in a lookup table format and mapped to delineate and grade each risk level. The results show the method is practical, with high feasibility. Compared with traditional machine learning methods, the BGA-strategy-oriented CNN model more effectively differentiated the extremely low- and extremely high-susceptibility areas, enhancing decision-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting surface deformation associated with low-magnitude ( M w ≤ 5 ) seismicity using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is challenging due to the subtlety of the signal and the often challenging imaging environments. However, low-magnitude earthquakes are potential precursors to larger seismic events, and thus characterizing the crustal displacement associated with them is crucial for regional seismic hazard assessment. We combine InSAR time-series techniques with a Deep Learning (DL) autoencoder denoiser to detect the magnitude and extent of crustal deformation from the M w = 3.4 Gallina, New Mexico earthquake that occurred on 30 July 2020. Although InSAR alone cannot detect event-related deformation from such a low-magnitude seismic event, application of the DL method reveals maximum displacements as small as (±2.5 mm) in the vicinity of both the fault and earthquake epicenter without prior knowledge of the fault system. This finding improves small-scale displacement discernment with InSAR by an order of magnitude relative to previous studies. We additionally estimate best-fitting fault parameters associated with the observed deformation. The application of the DL technique unlocks the potential for low-magnitude earthquake studies, providing new insights into local fault geometries and potential risks from higher-magnitude earthquakes. This technique also permits low-magnitude event monitoring in areas where seismic networks are sparse, allowing for the possibility of global fault deformation monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs the reflection symmetry decomposition (RSD) method to extract polarization scattering features from ground object images, aiming to determine the optimal data input scheme for deep learning networks in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar classification. Eight distinct polarizing feature combinations were designed, and the classification accuracy of various approaches was evaluated using the classic convolutional neural networks (CNNs) AlexNet and VGG16. The findings reveal that the commonly employed six-parameter input scheme, favored by many researchers, lacks the comprehensive utilization of polarization information and warrants attention. Intriguingly, leveraging the complete nine-parameter input scheme based on the polarization coherence matrix results in improved classification accuracy. Furthermore, the input scheme incorporating all 21 parameters from the RSD and polarization coherence matrix notably enhances overall accuracy and the Kappa coefficient compared to the other seven schemes. This comprehensive approach maximizes the utilization of polarization scattering information from ground objects, emerging as the most effective CNN input data scheme in this study. Additionally, the classification performance using the second and third component total power values (P2 and P3) from the RSD surpasses the approach utilizing surface scattering power value (PS) and secondary scattering power value (PD) from the same decomposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tomographic Synthetic Aperture Radar (TomoSAR) building object height inversion is a sparse reconstruction problem that utilizes the data obtained from several spacecraft passes to invert the scatterer position in the height direction. In practical applications, the number of passes is often small, and the observation data are also small due to the objective conditions, so this study focuses on the inversion under the restricted observation data conditions. The Analytic Learned Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (ALISTA) is a kind of deep unfolding network algorithm, which is a combination of the Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (ISTA) and deep learning technology, and it has the advantages of both. The ALISTA is one of the representative algorithms for TomoSAR building object height inversion. However, the structure of the ALISTA algorithm is simple, which has neither the excellent connection structure of a deep learning network nor the acceleration format combined with the ISTA algorithm. Therefore, this study proposes two directions of improvement for the ALISTA algorithm: firstly, an improvement in the inter-layer connection of the network by introducing a connection similar to residual networks obtains the Extragradient Analytic Learned Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (EALISTA) and further proves that the EALISTA achieves linear convergence; secondly, there is an improvement in the iterative format of the intra-layer iteration of the network by introducing the Nesterov momentum acceleration, which obtains the Fast Analytic Learned Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (FALISTA). We first performed inversion experiments on simulated data, which verified the effectiveness of the two proposed algorithms. Then, we conducted TomoSAR building object height inversion experiments on limited measured data and used the deviation metric P to measure the robustness of the algorithms to invert under restricted observation data. The results show that both proposed algorithms have better robustness, which verifies the superior performance of the two algorithms. In addition, we further analyze how to choose the most suitable algorithms for inversion in engineering practice applications based on the results of the experiments on measured data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ships are important targets for modern naval warfare detection and reconnaissance. The accurate detection of ships contributes to the maintenance of maritime rights and interests and the realisation of naval strategy. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image detection tasks play a vital role in ship detection, which has consistently been a research hotspot in the field of SAR processing. Although significant progress has been achieved in SAR ship detection techniques using deep learning methods, some challenges still persist. Natural images and SAR images significantly diverge in imaging mechanisms and scattering characteristics. In complex background environments, ships exhibit multiscale variations and dense arrangements, and numerous small-sized ships may be present, culminating in false or missed detections. To address these issues, we propose a novel SAR ship detection network, namely, a Wavelet-Driven Feature-Enhanced Attention–You Only Look Once X (WDFA-YOLOX) network. Firstly, we propose a Wavelet Cascade Residual (WCR) module based on the traditional image processing technique wavelet transform, which is embedded within an improved Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) module, culminating in the formation of the effective wavelet transform-based SPP module (WSPP). The WSPP compensates for the loss of fine-grained feature information during pooling, enhancing the capability of the network to detect ships amidst complex background interference. Secondly, a Global and Local Feature Attention Enhancement (GLFAE) module is proposed, leveraging a parallel structure that combines convolutional modules with transformer modules to reduce the effect of irrelevant information and effectively strengthens valid features associated with small-sized ships, resulting in a reduction in false negatives in small-sized ship detection. Finally, a novel loss function, the Chebyshev distance-generalised IoU loss function, is proposed to significantly enhance both the precision of the detection box and the network convergence speed. To support our approach, we performed thorough experiments on the SSDD and HRSID, achieving an average precision (AP) of 99.11% and 96.20%, respectively, in ship detection. The experimental results demonstrate that WDFA-YOLOX has significant advantages in terms of detection accuracy, generalisation capability, and detection speed and can effectively realise more accurate detection in SAR images, consistently exhibiting superior performance and application value in SAR ship detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing availability of satellite monitoring data, the demand for storage and computational resources for updating the results of monitoring the surface subsidence in a mining area continues to rise. Sequential adjustment (SA) models are considered effective for rapidly updating time series interferometry synthetic aperture radar (TS-InSAR) measurements. However, the accuracy of surface subsidence values estimated through traditional sequential adjustment is highly sensitive to abnormal observations or prior information on anomalies. Moreover, the surface subsidence associated with mining exhibits nonlinear and large gradient characteristics, making general InSAR methods challenging for obtaining reliable monitoring results. In this study, we employ the phase unwrapping network (PUNet) to obtain unwrapped values of differential interferograms. To mitigate the impact of abnormal errors in the near real-time small baseline subset InSAR (SBAS-InSAR) sequential updating process in mining areas, a robust sequential adjustment method based on M-estimation is proposed to estimate the temporal deformation parameters by using the equivalent weight model. Using a coal backfilling mining face in Shanxi, China, as the study area and the Sentinel-1 SAR dataset, we comprehensively evaluate the performance of unwrapping methods and subsidence time series estimation techniques and evaluate the effect of filling mining on surface subsidence control. The results are validated using leveling measurements within the study area. The relative error of the proposed method is less than 5%, which can meet the requirements of monitoring the surface subsidence in mining areas. The method proposed in this study not only enhances computational efficiency but also addresses the issue of underestimation encountered by InSAR methods in mining area applications. Furthermore, it also mitigates unwrapping phase anomalies on the monitoring results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective features play an important role in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image interpretation. However, since SAR images contain a variety of terrain types, it is not easy to extract effective features of different terrains from SAR images. Deep learning methods require a large amount of labeled data, but the difficulty of SAR image annotation limits the performance of deep learning models. SAR images have inevitable geometric distortion and coherence speckle noise, which makes it difficult to extract effective features from SAR images. If effective semantic context features cannot be learned for SAR images, the extracted features struggle to distinguish different terrain categories. Some existing terrain classification methods are very limited and can only be applied to some specified SAR images. To solve these problems, a jigsaw puzzle self-supervised learning (JPSSL) framework is proposed. The framework comprises a jigsaw puzzle pretext task and a terrain classification downstream task. In the pretext task, the information in the SAR image is learned by completing the SAR image jigsaw puzzle to extract effective features. The terrain classification downstream task is trained using only a small number of labeled data. Finally, fully connected conditional random field processing is performed to eliminate noise points and obtain a high-quality terrain classification result. Experimental results on three large-scene high-resolution SAR images confirm the effectiveness and generalization of our method. Compared with the supervised methods, the features learned in JPSSL are highly discriminative, and the JPSSL achieves good classification accuracy when using only a small amount of labeled data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crop classification is indispensable for agricultural monitoring and food security, but early-season mapping has remained challenging. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR), such as RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) and Sentinel-1, can meet higher requirements on the reliability of satellite data acquisition with all-weather and all-day imaging capability to supply dense observations in the early crop season. This study applied the local window attention transformer (LWAT) to time-series SAR data, including RCM and Sentinel-1, for early-season crop classification. The performance of this integration was evaluated over crop-dominated regions (corn, soybean and wheat) in southwest Ontario, Canada. Comparative analyses against several machine learning and deep learning methods revealed the superiority of the LWAT, achieving an impressive F1-score of 97.96% and a Kappa coefficient of 97.08% for the northern crop region and F1-scores of 98.07% and 97.02% for the southern crop region when leveraging time-series data from RCM and Sentinel-1, respectively. Additionally, by the incremental procedure, the evolution of accuracy determined by RCM and Sentinel-1 was analyzed, which demonstrated that RCM performed better at the beginning of the season and could achieve comparable accuracy to that achieved by utilizing both datasets. Moreover, the beginning of stem elongation of corn was identified as a crucial phenological stage to acquire acceptable crop maps in the early season. This study explores the potential of RCM to provide reliable prior information early enough to assist with in-season production forecasting and decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the development of intelligent sensor systems has experienced remarkable growth, particularly in the domain of microwave and millimeter wave sensing, thanks to the increased availability of affordable hardware components. With the development of smart Ground-Based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GBSAR) system called GBSAR-Pi, we previously explored object classification applications based on raw radar data. Building upon this foundation, in this study, we analyze the potential of utilizing polarization information to improve the performance of deep learning models based on raw GBSAR data. The data are obtained with a GBSAR operating at 24 GHz with both vertical (VV) and horizontal (HH) polarization, resulting in two matrices (VV and HH) per observed scene. We present several approaches demonstrating the integration of such data into classification models based on a modified ResNet18 architecture. We also introduce a novel Siamese architecture tailored to accommodate the dual input radar data. The results indicate that a simple concatenation method is the most promising approach and underscore the importance of considering antenna polarization and merging strategies in deep learning applications based on radar data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airborne array-interferometric synthetic aperture radar (array-InSAR), one of the implementation methods of tomographic SAR (TomoSAR), has the advantages of all-time, all-weather, high consistency, and exceptional timeliness. As urbanization continues to develop, the utilization of array-InSAR data for building detection holds significant application value. Existing methods, however, face challenges in terms of automation and detection accuracy, which can impact the subsequent accuracy and quality of building modeling. On the other hand, deep learning methods are still in their infancy in SAR point cloud processing. Existing deep learning methods do not adapt well to this problem. Therefore, we propose a Position-Feature Attention Network (PFA-Net), which seamlessly integrates positional encoding with point transformer for SAR point clouds building target segmentation tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed network is better suited to handle the inherent characteristics of SAR point clouds, including high noise levels and multiple scattering artifacts. And it achieves more accurate segmentation results while maintaining computational efficiency and avoiding errors associated with manual labeling. The experiments also investigate the role of multidimensional features in SAR point cloud data. This work also provides valuable insights and references for future research between SAR point clouds and deep learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Amazon, the world's largest rainforest, faces a severe historic drought. The Rio Negro River, one of the major Amazon River tributaries, reached its lowest level in a century in October 2023. Here, we used a U-net deep learning model to map water surfaces in the Rio Negro River basin every 12 days in 2022 and 2023 using 10 m spatial resolution Sentinel-1 satellite radar images. The accuracy of the water surface model was high, with an F1-score of 0.93. A 12-day mosaic time series of the water surface was generated from the Sentinel-1 prediction. The water surface mask demonstrated relatively consistent agreement with the global surface water (GSW) product from the Joint Research Centre (F1-score: 0.708) and with the Brazilian MapBiomas Water initiative (F1-score: 0.686). The main errors of the map were omission errors in flooded woodland, in flooded shrub, and because of clouds. Rio Negro water surfaces reached their lowest level around the 25th of November 2023 and were reduced to 68.1% (9559.9 km2) of the maximum water surfaces observed in the period 2022–2023 (14,036.3 km2). Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, in conjunction with deep learning techniques, can significantly improve near-real-time mapping of water surfaces in tropical regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-dimensional phase unwrapping (2-D PU) is vital for reconstructing Earth's surface topography and displacement from interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data. Conventional algorithms rely on the postulate, but this assumption is often insufficient due to abrupt topographic changes and severe noise. To address this challenge, our research proposes a novel approach utilizing deep convolutional neural networks inspired by the U-Net architecture to estimate phase gradient information. Our approach involves downsampling the input data to extract crucial features, followed by upsampling to restore spatial resolution. We incorporate two attention mechanisms—feature pyramid attention (FPA) and global attention upsample (GAU)—and a residual structure in the network's structure. Thus, we construct ResDANet (residual and dual attention net). We rigorously train ResDANet utilizing simulated datasets and employ an L1-norm objective function to minimize the disparity between unwrapped phase gradients and those calculated by ResDANet, yielding the final 2-D PU results. The network is rigorously trained using two distinct training strategies and encompassing three types of simulated datasets. ResDANet exhibits excellent robust performance and efficiency on simulated data and real data, such as China's Three Gorges and an Italian volcano. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship detection and classification has gained unprecedented attention due to its important role in maritime transportation. Many deep learning-based detectors and classifiers have been successfully applied and achieved great progress. However, ships in SAR images present discrete and multi-centric features, and their scattering characteristics and edge information are sensitive to variations in target attitude angles (TAAs). These factors pose challenges for existing methods to obtain satisfactory results. To address these challenges, a novel target attitude angle-guided network (TAG-Net) is proposed in this article. The core idea of TAG-Net is to leverage TAA information as guidance and use an adaptive feature-level fusion strategy to dynamically learn more representative features that can handle the target imaging diversity caused by TAA. This is achieved through a TAA-aware feature modulation (TAFM) module. It uses the TAA information and foreground information as prior knowledge and establishes the relationship between the ship scattering characteristics and TAA information. This enables a reduction in the intra-class variability and highlights ship targets. Additionally, considering the different requirements of the detection and classification tasks for the scattering information, we propose a layer-wise attention-based task decoupling detection head (LATD). Unlike general deep learning methods that use shared features for both detection and classification tasks, LATD extracts multi-level features and uses layer attention to achieve feature decoupling and select the most suitable features for each task. Finally, we introduce a novel salient-enhanced feature balance module (SFB) to provide richer semantic information and capture the global context to highlight ships in complex scenes, effectively reducing the impact of background noise. A large-scale ship detection dataset (LSSDD+) is used to verify the effectiveness of TAG-Net, and our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-resolution synthetic aperture radars (SARs) are becoming an indispensable environmental monitoring system to capture the important geophysical phenomena on the earth and sea surface. However, there is a lack of comprehensive models that can orchestrate such large-scale datasets from numerous satellite missions such as GaoFen-3 and Sentinel-1. In addition, these SAR images of different ocean scenes need to convey a variety of high-level classification features in oceanic and atmospheric phenomena. In this study, we propose a multichannel neural network (MCNN) that supports oceanic SAR scene classification for limited oceanic data samples according to multi-feature fusion, data augmentation, and multichannel feature extraction. To exploit the multichannel semantics of SAR scenes, the multi-feature fusion module effectively combines and reshapes the spatiotemporal SAR images to preserve their structural properties. This fine-grained feature augmentation policy is extended to improve the data quality so that the classification model is less vulnerable to both small- and large-scale data. The multichannel feature extraction also aggregates different oceanic features convolutionally extracted from ocean SAR scenes to improve the classification accuracy of oceanic phenomena with different scales. Through extensive experimental analysis, our MCNN framework has demonstrated a commendable classification performance, achieving an average precision rate of 96%, an average recall rate of 95%, and an average F-score of 95% across ten distinct oceanic phenomena. Notably, it surpasses two state-of-the-art classification techniques, namely, AlexNet and CMwv, by margins of 23.7% and 18.3%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frequent occurrence of global flood disasters leads to millions of people falling into poverty each year, which poses immense pressure on governments and hinders social development. Therefore, providing more data support for flood disaster detection is of paramount importance. To facilitate the development of water body detection algorithms, we create the DaliWS dataset for water segmentation, which contains abundant pixel-level annotations, and consists of high spatial resolution SAR images collected from the GaoFen-3 (GF-3) satellite. For comprehensive analysis, extensive experiments are conducted on the DaliWS dataset to explore the performance of the state-of-the-art segmentation models, including FCN, SegNeXt, U-Net, and DeeplabV3+, and investigate the impact of different polarization modes on water segmentation. Additionally, to probe the generalization of our dataset, we further evaluate the models trained with the DaliWS dataset, on publicly available water segmentation datasets. Through detailed analysis of the experimental results, we establish a valuable benchmark and provide usage guidelines for future researchers working with the DaliWS dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the F1 scores of FCN, SegNeXt, U-Net, and DeeplabV3+ on the dual-polarization data of DaliWS dataset reach to 90.361%, 90.192%, 92.110%, and 91.199%, respectively, and these four models trained using the DaliWS dataset exhibit excellent generalization performance on the public dataset, which further confirms the research value of our dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ship detection using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is widely applied to marine monitoring, ship identification, and other intelligent maritime applications. It also improves shipping efficiency, reduces marine traffic accidents, and promotes marine resource development. Land reflection and sea clutter introduce noise into SAR imaging, making the ship features in the image less prominent, which makes the detection of multi-scale ship targets more difficult. Therefore, a cross-scale ship detection network for SAR images based on efficient receptive field and enhanced hierarchical fusion is proposed. In order to retain more information and lighten the weight of the network, an efficient receptive field feature extraction backbone network (ERFBNet) is designed, and the multi-channel coordinate attention mechanism (MCCA) is embedded to highlight the ship features. Then, an enhanced hierarchical feature fusion network (EHFNet) is proposed to better characterize the features by fusing information from lower and higher layers. Finally, the feature map is input into the detection head with improved bounding box loss function. Using SSDD and HRSID as experimental datasets, average accuracies of 97.3% and 90.6% were obtained, respectively, and the network performed well in most scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are inevitably interspersed with speckle noise due to their coherent imaging mechanism, which greatly hinders subsequent related research and application. In recent studies, deep learning has become an effective tool for despeckling remote sensing images. However, preserving more texture details while removing speckle noise remains a challenging task in the field of SAR image despeckling. Furthermore, most despeckling algorithms are designed specifically for a specific look and seriously lack generalizability. Therefore, in order to remove speckle noise in SAR images, a novel end-to-end frequency domain decomposition network (SAR−FDD) is proposed. The method first performs frequency domain decomposition to generate high-frequency and low-frequency information. In the high-frequency branch, a mean filter is employed to effectively remove noise. Then, an interactive dual-branch framework is utilized to learn the details and structural information of SAR images, effectively reducing speckles by fully utilizing features from different frequencies. In addition, a blind denoising model is trained to handle noisy SAR images with unknown noise levels. The experimental results demonstrate that the SAR−FDD achieves good visual effects and high objective evaluation metrics on both simulated and real SAR test sets (peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR): 27.59 ± 1.57 and structural similarity index (SSIM): 0.78 ± 0.05 for different speckle noise levels), demonstrating its strong denoising performance and ability to preserve edge textures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many previous studies have primarily focused on the use of deep learning for interferometric processing or separate recognition purposes rather than targeted measurements of detected wellpads. The present study centered around the integration of deep learning recognition and interferometric measurements for Tengiz oilfield wellpads. This study proposes the optimization, automation, and acceleration of targeted ground deformation wellpad monitoring. Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN)-based deep learning wellpad recognition and consequent Small Baseline Subset Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (SBAS-InSAR) analyses were used for the assessment of ground deformation in the wellpads. The Mask R-CNN technique allowed us to detect 159 wells with a confidence level of more than 95%. The Mask R-CNN model achieved a precision value of 0.71 and a recall value of 0.91. SBAS-InSAR interferometric measurements identified 13 wells for Sentinel-1 (SNT1), 8 wells for COSMO-SkyMed (CSK), and 20 wells for TerraSAR-X (TSX) located within the −54–−40 mm/y class of vertical displacement (VD) velocity. Regression analyses for the annual deformation velocities and cumulative displacements (CD) of wells derived from SNT1, CSK, and TSX satellite missions showed a good agreement with R2 > 95. The predictions for cumulative displacements showed that the vertical subsidence processes will continue and reach −339 mm on 31 December 2023, with increasing spatial coverage and the potential to impact a higher number of wells. The hydrological analyses in the Tengiz oilfield clearly demonstrated that water flow has been moving towards the detected hotspot of subsidence and that its accumulation will increase with increasing subsidence. This detected subsidence hotspot was observed at a crossing with a seismic fault that might always be subject to reactivation. The role of this seismic fault should also be investigated as one of the ground deformation-controlling factors, even though this area is not considered seismically active. The primary practical and scientific values of these studies were identified for the operational risk assessment and maintenance needs of oilfield and gas field operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wildfires play a crucial role in the transformation of forest ecosystems and exert a significant influence on the global climate over geological timescales. Recent shifts in climate patterns and intensified human–forest interactions have led to an increase in the incidence of wildfires. These fires are characterized by their extensive coverage, higher frequency, and prolonged duration, rendering them increasingly destructive. To mitigate the impact of wildfires on climate change, ecosystems, and biodiversity, it is imperative to conduct systematic monitoring of wildfire progression and evaluate their environmental repercussions on a global scale. Satellite remote sensing is a powerful tool, offering precise and timely data on terrestrial changes, and has been extensively utilized for wildfire identification, tracking, and impact assessment at both local and regional levels. The Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation, in collaboration with the Canadian Forest Service, has developed a comprehensive National Burned Area Composite (NBAC). This composite serves as a benchmark for curating a bi-temporal multi-source satellite image dataset for change detection, compiled from the archives of Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1, and ALOS-2 PALSAR-2. To our knowledge, this dataset is the inaugural large-scale, multi-source, and multi-frequency satellite image dataset with 20 m spatial resolution for wildfire mapping, monitoring, and evaluation. It harbors significant potential for enhancing wildfire management strategies, building upon the profound advancements in deep learning that have contributed to the field of remote sensing. Based on our curated dataset, which encompasses major wildfire events in Canada, we conducted a systematic evaluation of the capability of multi-source satellite earth observation data in identifying wildfire-burned areas using statistical analysis and deep learning. Our analysis compares the difference between burned and unburned areas using post-event observation solely or bi-temporal (pre- and post-event) observations across diverse land cover types. We demonstrate that optical satellite data yield higher separability than C-Band and L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which exhibit considerable overlap in burned and unburned sample distribution, as evidenced by SAR-based boxplots. With U-Net, we further explore how different input channels influence the detection accuracy. Our findings reveal that deep neural networks enhance SAR's performance in mapping burned areas. Notably, C-Band SAR shows a higher dependency on pre-event data than L-Band SAR for effective detection. A comparative analysis of U-Net and its variants indicates that U-Net works best with single-sensor data, while the late fusion architecture marginally surpasses others in the fusion of optical and SAR data. Accuracy across sensors is highest in closed forests, with sequentially lower performance in open forests, shrubs, and grasslands. Future work will extend the data from both spatial and temporal dimensions to encompass varied vegetation types and climate zones, furthering our understanding of multi-source and multi-frequency satellite remote sensing capabilities in wildfire detection and monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical images provide highly complementary ground information. The fusion of SAR and optical data can significantly enhance semantic segmentation inference results. However, the fusion methods for multimodal data remains a challenge for current research due to significant disparities in imaging mechanisms from diverse sources. Our goal was to bridge the significant gaps between optical and SAR images by developing a dual-input model that utilizes image-level fusion. To improve most existing state-of-the-art image fusion methods, which often assign equal weights to multiple modalities, we employed the principal component analysis (PCA) transform approach. Subsequently, we performed feature-level fusion on shallow feature maps, which retain rich geometric information. We also incorporated a channel attention module to highlight channels rich in features and suppress irrelevant information. This step is crucial due to the substantial similarity between SAR and optical images in shallow layers such as geometric features. In summary, we propose a generic multimodal fusion strategy that can be attached to most encoding–decoding structures for feature classification tasks, designed with two inputs. One input is the optical image, and the other is the three-band fusion data obtained by combining the PCA component of the optical image with the SAR. Our feature-level fusion method effectively integrates multimodal data. The efficiency of our approach was validated using various public datasets, and the results showed significant improvements when applied to several land cover classification models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the domain of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image processing, a prevalent issue persists wherein research predominantly focuses on single-task learning, often neglecting the concurrent impact of speckle noise and low resolution on SAR images. Currently, there are two main processing strategies. The first strategy involves conducting speckle reduction and super-resolution processing step by step. The second strategy involves performing speckle reduction as an auxiliary step, with a focus on enhancing the primary task of super-resolution processing. However, both of these strategies exhibit clear deficiencies. Nevertheless, both tasks jointly focus on two key aspects, enhancing SAR quality and restoring details. The fusion of these tasks can effectively leverage their task correlation, leading to a significant improvement in processing effectiveness. Additionally, multi-temporal SAR images covering imaging information from different time periods exhibit high correlation, providing deep learning models with a more diverse feature expression space, greatly enhancing the model's ability to address complex issues. Therefore, this study proposes a deep learning network for integrated speckle reduction and super-resolution in multi-temporal SAR (ISSMSAR). The network aims to reduce speckle in multi-temporal SAR while significantly improving the image resolution. Specifically, it consists of two subnetworks, each taking the SAR image at time 1 and the SAR image at time 2 as inputs. Each subnetwork includes a primary feature extraction block (PFE), a high-level feature extraction block (HFE), a multi-temporal feature fusion block (FFB), and an image reconstruction block (REC). Following experiments on diverse data sources, the results demonstrate that ISSMSAR surpasses speckle reduction and super-resolution methods based on a single task in terms of both subjective perception and objective evaluation metrics regarding the quality of image restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]