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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]

In remote sensing change detection, Markov random field (MRF) has been used successfully to model the prior probability using class-labels dependencies. MRF has played an important role in the detection of complex urban changes using optical images. However, the preservation of details in urban change analysis turns out to be a highly complex task if multitemporal SAR images with their speckle are to be used. Here, the ability of MRF to preserve geometric details and to combat speckle effect at the same time becomes questionable. Blob-region phenomenon and fine structures removal are common consequences of the application of traditional MRF-based change detection algorithm. To overcome these limitations, the iterated conditional modes (ICM) framework for the optimization of the maximum a posteriori (MAP-MRF) criterion function is extended to include a nonlocal probability maximization step. This probability model, which characterizes the relationship between pixels’ class-labels in a nonlocal scale, has the potential to preserve spatial details and to reduce speckle effects. Two multitemporal SAR datasets were used to assess the proposed algorithm. Experimental results using three density functions [i.e., the log normal (LN), generalized Gaussian (GG), and normal distributions (ND)] have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed approach in terms of detail preservation and noise suppression. Compared with the traditional MRF algorithm, the proposed approach proved to be less-sensitive to the value of the contextual parameter and the chosen density function. The proposed approach has also shown less sensitivity to the quality of the initial change map when compared with the ICM algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images have been increasingly used in change detection studies. However, the presence of speckle is the main disadvantage of this type of data. To reduce speckle, many local adaptive filters have been developed. Although these filters are effective in reducing speckle in homogeneous areas, their use is often accompanied with the degradation of spatial details and fine structures. In this paper, we investigate a nonlocal means (NLM) denoising algorithm that combines local structures with a global averaging scheme in the context of change detection using multitemporal SAR images. First, the ratio image is logarithmically scaled to convert the multiplicative noise model to an additive model. A multidimensional change image is then constructed using image neighborhood feature vectors. Principle component analysis is then used to reduce the dimensionality of the neighborhood feature vectors. Recursive linear regression combined with fitting-accuracy assessment strategy is developed to determine the number of significant PC components to be retained for similarity weight computation. An intuitive method to estimate the unknown noise variance (necessary to run the NLM algorithm) based on the discarded PC components is also proposed. The efficiency of the method has been assessed using two different bitemporal SAR datasets acquired in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively. For comparison purposes, the algorithm is also tested against some of the most commonly used local adaptive filters. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the algorithm have demonstrated the efficiency of the algorithm in recovering the noise-free change image while preserving the complex structures in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this research is to examine effective methods for urban change detection using multitemporal spaceborne SAR data in two rapid expanding cities in China. One scene of ERS-2 SAR C-VV image was acquired in Beijing in 1998 and in shanghai in 1999 respectively and one scene of ENVISAT ASAR C-VV image was acquired in near-anniversary dates in 2008 in Beijing and Shanghai. To compare the SAR images from different dates, a modified ratio operator that takes into account both positive and negative changes was developed to derive a change image. A generalized version of Kittler-Illingworth minimum-error thresholding algorithm was then tested to automatically classify the change image into two classes, change and no change. Various probability density functions such as Log normal, Generalized Gaussian, Nakagami ratio, and Weibull ratio were investigated to model the distribution of the change and no change classes. The results showed that Kittler-Illingworth algorithm applied to the modified ratio image is very effective in detecting temporal changes in urban areas using SAR images. Log normal and Nakagami density models achieved the best results. The Kappa coefficients of these methods were of 0.82 and 0.71 for Beijing and Shanghai respectively while the false alarm rates were 2.7% and 4.75%. The findings indicated that the change accuracies obtained using Kittler-Illingworth algorithm vary depending on how the assumed conditional class density function fits the histograms of change and no change classes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wildfires are increasing in intensity and frequency across the globe due to climate change and rising global temperature. Development of novel approach to Monitor wildfire progressions in near real-time is therefore of critical importance for emergency responses. The objective of this research is to investigate continuous learning with U-Net by exploiting both Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 MSI time series for increasing the frequency and accuracy of wildfire progression mapping. In this study, optical-based burned areas prior to each SAR acquisition (when available) were accumulated into SAR-based pseudo progression masks to train a deep residual U-Net model. Unlike multi-temporal fusion of SAR and optical data, the temporal fusion of progression masks allows us to track as many wildfire progressions as possible. Specifically, two approaches were investigated to train the deep residual U-Net model for continuous learning: 1) Continuous joint training (CJT) with all historical data (including both SAR and optical data); 2) Learning without forgetting (LwF) based on newly incoming data alone (SAR or optical). For LwF, a mean squared loss was integrated to keep the capabilities learned before and prevent it from overfitting to newly incoming data only. By fusing optical-based burned areas, SAR-based progression pseudo masks improve significantly, which benefits both data sampling and model training, considering the challenges in SAR-based change extraction attributed to the variability in SAR backscatter of the surrounding environments. Pre-trained ResNet was frozen as the encoder of the U-Net model, and the decoder part was trained to further refine the derived burned area maps in a progression-wise manner. The experimental results demonstrated that LwF has the potential to match CJT in terms of the agreement between SAR-based results and optical-based ground truth, achieving a F1 score of 0.8423 on the Sydney Fire (2019–2020) and 0.7807 on the Chuckegg Creek Fire (2019). We also observed that the SAR cross-polarization ratio (VH/VV) shows good capability in suppressing multiplicative noise and detecting burned areas when VH and VV have diverse temporal behaviors. • Proposed a near real-time fire progression mapping approach for multi-sensor data. • Investigated the potential of VH/VV in highlighting the SAR backscatter changes. • Validated the contribution of optical data to improving SAR-based reference masks. • Demonstrated the feasibility of training a single U-Net for optical and radar data. • Integrated Learning-w/o-Forgetting with U-Net for continuous progression mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with optical sensors, the all-weather and day-and-night imaging ability of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) makes it competitive for burnt area mapping. This study investigates the potential of Sentinel-1 C-band SAR sensors in burnt area mapping with an implicit Radar Convolutional Burn Index (RCBI). Based on multitemporal Sentinel-1 SAR data, a convolutional networks-based classification framework is proposed to learn the RCBI for highlighting the burnt areas. We explore the mapping accuracy level that can be achieved using SAR intensity and phase information for both VV and VH polarizations. Moreover, we investigate the decorrelation of Interferometric SAR (InSAR) coherence to wildfire events using different temporal baselines. The experimental results on two recent fire events, Thomas Fire (Dec., 2017) and Carr Fire (July, 2018) in California, demonstrate that the learnt RCBI has a better potential than the classical log-ratio operator in highlighting burnt areas. By exploiting both VV and VH information, the developed RCBI achieved an overall mapping accuracy of 94.68% and 94.17% on the Thomas Fire and Carr Fire, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]