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This paper proposes a new theory of gravity based on aether destruction. In the case of the earth, aether is destroyed within the earth. Aether then accelerates into the earth in an attempt to keep the aether pressure in the earth constant. Any object caught in the accelerating aether flow will be accelerated in the direction of the accelerating aether flow. We suggest a mathematical model to demonstrate that there is a correlation between the aether acceleration and the force of gravity. The mathematical model assumes a porous-like atomic nucleus, in which the nucleons are fixed in position, and a fluid-like aether that can infiltrate between the nucleons but is excluded from their interiors. This theory of gravity assumes that the aether particle interactions are perfectly elastic, and aether can easily penetrate the nucleus of atoms, as they are not affected by electromagnetic or nuclear forces. The effect of gravity is almost entirely due to the fact that aether cannot penetrate the interior of nucleons. We offer a new model of the aether, which includes some new and important concepts that are essential to explain the cause and effect of gravity. The reason why all objects fall at the same speed is explained, and the possible causes for the destruction of the aether are discussed. Since the aether destruction is proportional to the mass of the earth and is, therefore, a cubic relationship, the effect of the accelerating aether flow (gravity) on an object caught in the accelerating aether flow depends on the surface area of the nucleons making up the object and is a square relationship, clarifying, thus, the dilemma cubic or square relationship.

The aether theory of gravity basically states that the gravity produced by a large object such as the earth is that aether is destroyed or modified within the earth. This results in a fall in aether pressure within the earth. Aether then accelerates into the earth from outer space in order to keep the aether pressure within the earth constant. The aether accelerating into the earth exerts a force on all objects caught in the accelerating aether flow. We have modified the existing theories of what aether is, and using these modifications and existing published figures on the structure of atomic nuclei, we have been able to calculate the aether pressure at the surface of the earth, as well as calculating the gravitational force per nucleon at the surface of the earth. We calculated the aether pressure at the surface of the earth as being 3311 N/m2 or 337.66 kg/m2. The gravitational force per nucleon is 1.627 × 10−26 N/nucleon. We present an entirely new way to calculate the gravitational force acting on an object at the surface of the earth based on the aether theory of gravity and aether dynamics. The force of gravity acting on an object (F) is the product of the aether pressure (P), the mass of object in grams (m), the effective surface area of a nucleon (Seff), and Avogadro’s number. The effective surface area is proportional to half of the surface area of a nucleon (S) multiplied by a factor (). The factor necessary to modify the effective surface area was calculated using calculus. The fact that this equation, based on aether dynamics, actually works demonstrates that the aether theory of gravity may well be correct.

Satellite sensors need to make a trade-off between revisit frequency and spatial resolution. This work presents a spatio-temporal image fusion method called Unpaired Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Image Patches (USTFIP). This method combines data from different multispectral sensors and creates images combining the best of each satellite in terms of frequency and resolution. It generates synthetic images and selects optimal information from cloud-contaminated images, to avoid the need of cloud-free matching pairs of satellite images. The removal of this restriction makes it easier to run our fusion algorithm even in the presence of clouds, which are frequent in time series of satellite images. The increasing demand of larger datasets makes necessary the use of computationally optimized methods. Therefore, this method is programmed to run in parallel reducing the run-time with regard to other methods. USTFIP is tested through an experimental scenario with similar procedures as Fit-FC, STARFM and FSDAF. Finally, USTFIP is the most robust, since its prediction accuracy deprecates at a much lower rate as classical requirements become progressively difficult to meet.

Semantic segmentation of remotely sensed imagery plays a critical role in many real-world applications, such as environmental change monitoring, precision agriculture, environmental protection, and economic assessment. Following rapid developments in sensor technologies, vast numbers of fine-resolution satellite and airborne remote sensing images are now available, for which semantic segmentation is potentially a valuable method. However, because of the rich complexity and heterogeneity of information provided with an ever-increasing spatial resolution, state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms commonly adopt complex network structures for segmentation, which often result in significant computational demand. Particularly, the frequently-used fully convolutional network (FCN) relies heavily on fine-grained spatial detail (fine spatial resolution) and contextual information (large receptive fields), both imposing high computational costs. This impedes the practical utility of FCN for real-world applications, especially those requiring real-time data processing. In this paper, we propose a novel Attentive Bilateral Contextual Network (ABCNet), a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) with a spatial path and a contextual path. Extensive experiments, including a comprehensive ablation study, demonstrate that ABCNet has strong discrimination capability with competitive accuracy compared with state-of-the-art benchmark methods while achieving significantly increased computational efficiency. Specifically, the proposed ABCNet achieves a 91.3% overall accuracy (OA) on the Potsdam test dataset and outperforms all lightweight benchmark methods significantly. The code is freely available at https://github.com/lironui/ABCNet .

In remote sensing (RS), shadows play an important role, commonly affecting the quality of data recorded by remote sensors. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to detect and model the shadow effect in RS data as well as the information that is obtained from them, particularly when the data are to be used in further environmental studies. Shadows can generally be categorized into four types based on their sources: cloud shadows, topographic shadows, urban shadows, and a combination of these. The main objective of this study was to review the recent literature on the shadow effect in remote sensing. A systematic literature review was employed to evaluate studies published since 1975. Various studies demonstrated that shadows influence significantly the estimation of various properties by remote sensing. These properties include vegetation, impervious surfaces, water, snow, albedo, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and land surface temperature. It should be noted that shadows also affect the outputs of remote sensing processes such as spectral indices, urban heat islands, and land use/cover maps. The effect of shadows on the extracted information is a function of the sensor–target–solar geometry, overpass time, and the spatial resolution of the satellite sensor imagery. Meanwhile, modeling the effect of shadow and applying appropriate strategies to reduce its impacts on various environmental and surface biophysical variables is associated with many challenges. However, some studies have made use of shadows and extracted valuable information from them. An overview of the proposed methods for identifying and removing the shadow effect is presented.

Sentinel-3 is a newly launched satellite implemented by the European Space Agency (ESA) for global observation. The Ocean and Land Colour Imager (OLCI) sensor onboard Sentinel-3 provides 21 band images with a fine spectral resolution and is of great value for ocean, land and atmospheric monitoring. The two platforms (Sentinel-3A and -3B) can provide OLCI images at an almost daily temporal resolution. The coarse spatial resolution of the 21 band OLCI images (i.e., 300 m), however, limits greatly their utility for local, precise monitoring. Sentinel-2, another satellite provided by ESA, carries the Multispectral Imager (MSI) sensor which can supply much finer spatial resolution (e.g., 10 m and 20 m) images. This paper introduces a new fusion framework integrating spatio-temporal-spectral information for downscaling Sentinel-3 OLCI images, which has two parts. Based on bands with similar wavelengths (i.e., bands 2, 3, 4 and 8a for Sentinel-2 and bands Oa4, Oa6, Oa8 and Oa17 for Sentinel-3), the four Sentinel-3 bands are first downscaled to the spatial resolution of Sentinel-2 images by applying spatio-temporal fusion to Sentinel-2 MSI and Sentinel-3 OLCI images. Then, to take full advantage of all 21 available OLCI bands of the Sentinel-3 images, the extended image pair-based spatio-spectral fusion (EIPSSF) method is proposed in this paper to downscale the other 17 bands. EIPSSF is performed based on the new concept of the extended image pair (EIP) and by exploiting existing spatio-temporal fusion approaches. The framework consisting of spatio-temporal and spatio-spectral fusion is entirely general, which provides a practical solution for comprehensive downscaling of Sentinel-3 OLCI images for fine spatial, temporal and spectral resolution monitoring.

Context Open data policies and accessible computation platforms allow efficient extraction of information from remote sensing data for landscape research. Landscape ecology is strongly influenced by remote sensing, and the value of fine resolution temporal information for characterising landscapes is under-explored. Objectives We highlighted the importance of temporal information extracted from remote sensing data gathered over a period of time for landscape research. A case study approach was used to show how time-series information can benefit the mapping of land cover and landscape elements in a heterogeneous landscape dominated by agricultural land use. Methods We constructed four composite images of the study area, each incorporating different levels of temporal information. The images either represent a single date or summarise temporal information into single values as the median of spectral bands or vegetation indices. Random forest and k-means clustering methods were used to classify the images. Results The overall accuracy of the landscape classifications ranged between 0.3 to 0.8, increasing substantially when including temporal information, for mapping both land cover and small landscape elements. Using temporal information and a RF-based classification it was generally possible to map crop and forest types. The size of landscape elements was overestimated, although the clustering model predicted elements close to their true size and complexity. Conclusions The approach highlights the importance of temporal resolution for landscape ecology research. The easy-to-implement methodology offers an opportunity for landscape ecologists to increase the accuracy of landscape mapping and identify ecologically important landscape elements that might otherwise be missed.

The highly dynamic nature of agro-ecosystems in space and time usually leads to high intra-class variance and low inter-class separability in the fine spatial resolution (FSR) remotely sensed imagery. This makes traditional classifiers essentially relying on spectral information for crop mapping from FSR imagery an extremely challenging task. To mine effectively the rich spectral and spatial information in FSR imagery, this paper proposed a Scale Sequence Object-based Convolutional Neural Network (SS-OCNN) that classifies images at the object level by taking segmented objects (crop parcels) as basic units of analysis, thus, ensuring that the boundaries between crop parcels are delineated precisely. These segmented objects were subsequently classified using a CNN model integrated with an automatically generated scale sequence of input patch sizes. This scale sequence can fuse effectively the features learned at different scales by transforming progressively the information extracted at small scales to larger scales. The effectiveness of the SS-OCNN was investigated using two heterogeneous agricultural areas with FSR SAR and optical imagery, respectively. Experimental results revealed that the SS-OCNN consistently achieved the most accurate classification results. The SS-OCNN, thus, provides a new paradigm for crop classification over heterogeneous areas using FSR imagery, and has a wide application prospect.

This research addresses the problem of automatic extraction of memorial objects from cultural heritage sites represented as scenes of 3D point clouds. Point clouds provide a fine spatial resolution and accurate proxy of the real world. However, how to use them directly is not always obvious. This is especially true for applications where extensive training data or computational resources are not available. In this paper, we present a methodology for automatic segmentation and labelling of cultural heritage objects from 3D point cloud scenes. The proposed methodology is based on machine learning techniques and, in particular, makes use of the concept of transfer learning. Memorial objects are segmented from the scene based on their geometric shape characteristic through a conditional multi-scale partitioning scheme. Then, high-level latent feature descriptors are extracted by a convolutional neural network pre-trained on different 3D object models from a standard dataset (e.g., ModelNet). Based on these descriptors, a classification model (multilayer perceptron) is trained and applied to obtain semantic labels. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed methodology is effective for the extraction and labelling of grave marker objects from cultural heritage sites.

Migrants are among the groups most vulnerable to infection with viruses due to the social and economic conditions in which they live. Therefore, spatial modeling of virus transmission among migrants is important for controlling and containing the COVID-19 pandemic. This research focused on modeling spatial associations between COVID-19 incidence rates and migrant workers. The aim was to understand the spatial relationships between COVID-19 infection rates of migrants and the type of workplace at the subnational level in Oman. Using empirical Bayes smoothing as well as local indicators of spatial associations, six work sectors (health, agriculture, retail and business, administrative, manufacturing, and mining) were investigated as risk factors for disease incidence. The results indicated that the six work sectors each had a significant spatial association with cases of COVID-19. High rates of COVID-19 cases in relation to the workplace were clustered in the densely populated areas of Muscat. Similarly, high rates of COVID-19 cases were located in the northern part of the country, along the Al-Batnah plain, where migrants are often employed in the agricultural sector. Further, the rate of COVID-19 in migrants employed in the health sector was higher than that for the other sectors. Therefore, working in the health sector can be considered a hot spot for the spread of COVID-19 infections. Due to a paucity of studies addressing the spatial analysis of COVID-19 associations with workplaces, the findings of this research are useful for decision makers to set the necessary policies and plans to control the outbreak of the virus not only in Oman or the Gulf Cooperation Council but also in other developing societies.

Remote sensing scene classification plays a critical role in a wide range of real-world applications. Technically, however, scene classification is an extremely challenging task due to the huge complexity in remotely sensed scenes, and the difficulty in acquiring labelled data for model training such as supervised deep learning. To tackle these issues, a novel semi-supervised ensemble framework is proposed here using the self-training hierarchical prototype-based classifier as the base learner for chunk-by-chunk prediction. The framework has the ability to build a powerful ensemble model from both labelled and unlabelled images with minimum supervision. Different feature descriptors are employed in the proposed ensemble framework to offer multiple independent views of images. Thus, the diversity of base learners is guaranteed for ensemble classification. To further increase the overall accuracy, a novel cross-checking strategy was introduced to enable the base learners to exchange pseudo-labelling information during the self-training process, and maximize the correctness of pseudo-labels assigned to unlabelled images. Extensive numerical experiments on popular benchmark remote sensing scenes demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed ensemble framework, especially where the number of labelled images available is limited. For example, the classification accuracy achieved on the OPTIMAL-31, PatternNet and RSI-CB256 datasets was up to 99.91%, 98. 67% and 99.07% with only 40% of the image sets used as labelled training images, surpassing or at least on par with mainstream benchmark approaches trained with double the number of labelled images.