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Deep neural networks have demonstrated outstanding performances in agriculture production. Agriculture production is one of the most important sectors because it has a direct impact on the economy and social life of any society. Plant disease identification is a big challenge for agriculture production, for which we need a fast and accurate technique to identify plant disease. With the recent advancement in deep learning, we can develop a robust and accurate system. This research investigated the use of deep learning for accurate and fast tomato plant disease identification. In this research, we have used individual and merged datasets of tomato plants with 10 diseases (including healthy plants). The main aim of this work is to check the accuracy of the existing convolutional neural network models such as Visual Geometry Group, Residual Net, and DenseNet on tomato plant disease detection and then design a custom deep neural network model to give the best accuracy in case of the tomato plant. We have trained and tested our models with datasets containing over 18,000 and 25,000 images with 10 classes. We achieved over 99% accuracy with our custom model. This high accuracy was achieved with less training time and lower computational cost compared to other CNNs. This research demonstrates the potential of deep learning for efficient and accurate tomato plant disease detection, which can benefit farmers and contribute to improved agricultural production. The custom model’s efficient performance makes it promising for practical implementation in real-world agricultural settings.

Differently from conventional procedures, the proposed solution advocates for a groundbreaking paradigm in water quality monitoring through the integration of satellite Remote Sensing data, Artificial Intelligence techniques, and onboard processing. While conventional procedures present several drawbacks mainly related to late intervention capabilities, the objective of what proposed is to offer nearly real-time detection of contaminants in coastal waters addressing a significant gap in the existing literature and allowing fast alerts and intervention. In fact, the expected outcomes include substantial advancements in environmental monitoring, public health protection, and resource conservation. Namely, the specific focus of our study is on the estimation of Turbidity and pH parameters, for their implications on human and aquatic health. Nevertheless, the designed framework can be extended to include other parameters of interest in the water environment and beyond. Originating from our participation in the European Space Agency OrbitalAI Challenge, this article describes the distinctive opportunities and issues for the contaminants' monitoring on the $\Phi$sat-2 mission. The specific characteristics of this mission, with the tools made available, will be presented, with the methodology proposed by the authors for the onboard monitoring of water contaminants in near real-time. Preliminary promising results are presented, along with an introduction to ongoing and future work.

Surface deformation caused by an earthquake is very important to study for a better understanding of the development of geological structures and seismic hazards in an active tectonic area. In this study, we estimated the surface deformation due to an earthquake along an active blind fault using Sentinel-1 SAR data. On 24 September 2019, an earthquake with 5.6 Mw and 10 km depth stroke near Mirpur, Pakistan. The Mirpur area was highly affected by this earthquake with a huge collapse and the death of 34 people. This study aims to estimate the surface deformation associated with this earthquake in Mirpur and adjacent areas. The interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technique was applied to study earthquake-induced surface motion. InSAR data consisting of nine Sentinel-1A SAR images from 11 August 2019 to 22 October 2019 was used to investigate the pre-, co- and post-seismic deformation trends. Time series investigation revealed that there was no significant deformation in the pre-seismic time. In the co-seismic time, strong displacement was observed and in post-seismic results, small displacements were seen due to 4.4 and 3.2 Mw aftershocks. Burst overlap interferometry and offset-tracking analysis were used for more sensitive measurements in the along-track direction. Comprehensive 3D displacement was mapped with the combination of LOS and along-track offset deformation. The major outcome of our results was the confirmation of the existence of a previously unpublished blind fault in Mirpur. Previously, this fault line was triggered during the 2005 earthquake and then it was activated on 24 September 2019. Additionally, we presented the co-seismically induced rockslides and some secondary faulting evidence, most of which occurred along or close to the pre-existing blind faults. The study area already faces many problems due to natural hazards where additional surface deformations, particularly because of the earthquake with activated blind fault, have increased its vulnerability.

Multilook approaches have been applied in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography (TomoSAR), for improving the density and regularity of persistent scatterers reconstructed from multipass SAR images in both rural and urban regions. Multilook operations assume that all scatterers in a given neighborhood are similar in height, thereby providing additional data for recovering the position and reflectivity of a single scatterer, so that a higher signal-to-noise ratio can be achieved. This is equivalent to assuming that scatterers belonging to a local neighborhood of range–azimuth cells are located on horizontal planes. The present article generalizes this approach by adopting the so-called local plane (LP) model for TomoSAR imaging in urban areas, accounting for local variations in the height of scatterers that are not negligible. Furthermore, an LP-generalized likelihood ratio test (LP-GLRT) algorithm is developed to implement the previous idea. Compared with the multilook generalized likelihood ratio test algorithm, LP-GLRT shows better performance in the case of urban structures and terrains in experiments based on both simulated data and TerraSAR-X images.

This Special Issue focuses on the potential of radar-based remote techniques for characterizing and monitoring natural and building structures [...]

Height estimation of scatterers in complex environments via the Tomographic Synthetic Aperture Radar (TomoSAR) technique is still a valuable research field. The parametric spectral estimation approach constitutes a powerful tool to identify the superimposed scatterers with different complex reflectivities, located at different heights in the same range–azimuth resolution cell. Unfortunately, this approach requires prior knowledge about the number of scatterers for each pixel, which is not possible in practical situations. In this paper, we propose a method that analyzes the scree plot, generated from the spectral decomposition of the multidimensional covariance matrix, in order to estimate automatically the number of scatterers for each resolution cell. In this context, a properly improved regularization step is included during the reconstruction process, transforming the parametric MUSIC estimator into a non-parametric method. The experimental results on two data sets covering high elevation towers, with different facade coating characteristics, acquired by the TerraSAR-X satellite highlighted the effectiveness of the proposed regularized MUSIC for the reconstruction of high man-made structures compared with classical approaches.

Structural health monitoring and damage detection tools are extremely important topics nowadays with the civil infrastructure aging and deteriorating problems observed in urban areas. These tasks can be done by visual inspection and by using traditional in situ methods, such as leveling or using traditional mechanical and electrical sensors, but these approaches are costly, labor-intensive and cannot be performed with a high temporal frequency. In recent years, remote sensing has proved to be a very promising methodology in evaluating the health of a structure by assessing its deformation and thermal dilation. The satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar Tomography (TomoSAR) technique, based on the exploitation of a stack of multi-temporal SAR images, allows to remotely sense the movement and the thermal dilation of individual structures with a centimeter- to millimeter-level accuracy, thanks to new generation high-resolution satellite-borne sensors. In this paper, the effectiveness of a recently developed TomoSAR technique in assessing both possible deformations and the thermal dilation evolution of man-made structures is shown. The results obtained using X-band SAR data in two case studies, concerning two urban structures in the city of Naples (Italy), are presented.

The maps and images of geographical information system (GIS) are used for finding locations, accessing rail, bus routes, and for educational purposes such as study on vegetation, landscapes, population, and so on and so forth. Remote sensing is the process of acquiring data about Earth by using satellites or satellite-borne or airborne sensors. The images acquired through remote sensing systems are integrated within GIS to store, analyze, and manipulate geographical information of the Earth. The huge size of the digital raster maps makes compression inevitable in particular to reduce the transmission time and display them on the Internet as well as other networks. In this paper, a lossless coding approach that performs encoding on the decomposed binary layers by taking the advantage of binary wavelet transform that produces sparse matrix for row column reduction and Huffman coding is presented. The results obtained on raster maps are compared with those of other existing techniques.

Speckle noise is presented as an inherent dilemma that affects the image processing field, and in particular synthetic aperture radar images. In order to mitigate the adverse effects caused by this phenomenon, several approaches have been introduced in the scientific community during the last three decades including spatial-based and non-local filtering approaches. However, these proposed techniques suffer from some limitations. In fact, it is very difficult to find an approach that is able, on the one hand, to perform well in terms of noise reduction and image detail preservation and, on the other hand, provide a filtering output solution without high computational complexity and within a short processing time. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the performance of a newly-developed despeckling algorithm, presented as an enhancement of the classical Wiener filter and properly designed to work with a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The algorithm is tested on both a simulated framework and real Sentinel-1 SAR data. The results, obtained in comparison with other filters, are interesting and promising. Indeed, the proposed method turns out to be a useful filtering instrument in the case of large images by performing the processing within a limited time and ensuring good speckle noise reduction with a considerable image detail preservation.

In the frame of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography, full-ranks reconstruction framework has been recognized as a significant technique for fully characterization of superimposed scatterers in a resolution cell. The technique, mainly is characterized by the advantages of polarimetric scattering pattern reconstruction, allows physical feature extraction of the scatterers. In this paper, to overcome the limitations of conventional full-rank tomographic techniques in natural environments, a polarimetric estimator with advantages of super-resolution imaging is proposed. Under the frame of compressive sensing (CS) and sparsity based reconstruction, the profile of second order polarimetric coherence matrix T is recovered. Once the polarimetric coherence matrices of the scatterers are available, the physical features can be extracted using classical polarimetric processing techniques. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of the proposed full-rank polarimetric reconstruction by means of conventional three-component decomposition of T, and focusing on the consistency of vertical resolution and polarimetric scattering pattern of the scatterers. The outcomes from simulated and two different real data sets confirm that significant improvement can be achieved in the reconstruction quality with respect to conventional approaches.

After almost two decades of long investigations into 3D imaging of natural environments, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography (TomoSAR) is now at an operational level. Yet, a major problem that limits the potential of TomoSAR is related to the temporal decorrelation of natural scatterers during multitemporal multibaseline data acquisition. In this paper, a comparative investigation into the effect of temporal decorrelation between employed polarizations is presented. A particular focus is put on practical and statistical analysis of the dispersion of polarimetric vertical reflectivity in the presence of temporal decorrelation. The analysis is based on the synthesis of all feasible polarimetric responses of a given scatterer from its measurements of a linear orthonormal basis. Such an analysis offers a comprehension of the expected level of temporal decorrelation in TomoSAR focusing with respect to employed polarization. The analysis was performed by simulating temporal decorrelation with different terms, depending on the vertical structure and polarization, which are important aspects in a forest scenario. Moreover, the experiment was extended to a P-band dataset relative to the forest site of Remningstorp, Sweden, which was acquired through the German Aerospace Center’s experimental SAR (E-SAR) airborne system in the framework of the European Space Agency (ESA) campaign BioSAR.

In this paper, we investigate the potential of polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) tomography (Pol-TomoSAR) in urban applications. TomoSAR exploits the amplitude and phase of the received data and offers the possibility to resolve multiple scatters lying in the same range–azimuth resolution cell. In urban environments, this issue is very important since layover causes multiple coherent scatterers to be mapped in the same range–azimuth image pixel. To achieve reliable and accurate results, TomoSAR requires a large number of multi-baseline acquisitions which, for satellite-borne SAR systems, are collected with long time intervals. Then, accurate tomographic reconstructions would require multiple scatterers to remain stable between all the acquisitions. In this paper, an extension of a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT)-based tomographic approach, denoted as Fast-Sup-GLRT, to the polarimetric data case is introduced, with the purpose of investigating if, in urban applications, the use of polarimetric channels allows for reduction of the number of baselines required to achieve a given scatterer’s detection performance. The results presented show that the use of dual polarization data allows the proposed detector to work in an equivalent or better way than use of a double number of independent single polarization channels.

In this paper, persistent scatterer interferometry and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) tomography have been applied to Sentinel-1 data for urban monitoring. The paper analyses the applicability of SAR tomography to Sentinel-1 data, which is not granted, due to the reduced range and azimuth resolutions and the low resolution in elevation. In a first part of the paper, two implementations of the two techniques are described. In the experimental part, the two techniques are used in parallel to process the same Sentinel-1 data over two test areas. An intercomparison of the results from persistent scatterer interferometry and SAR tomography is carried out, comparing the main parameters estimated by the two techniques. Finally, the paper addresses the complementarity of the two techniques, and in particular it assesses the increase of measurement density that can be achieved by adding the double scatterers from SAR tomography to the persistent scatterer interferometry measurements.

The problem of detecting and locating multiple scatterers in multibaseline Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) tomography, starting from compressive measurements and applying support detection techniques, is addressed. Different approaches based on the detection of the support set of the unknown sparse vector, that is, of the position of the nonzero elements in the unknown sparse vector, are analyzed. Support detection techniques have already proved to allow a reduction in the number of measurements required for obtaining a reliable solution. In this paper, a support detection method, based on a Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (Sup-GLRT), is proposed and compared with the SequOMP method, in terms of probability of detection achievable with a given probability of false alarm and for different numbers of measurements.

This paper analyzes a method for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Tomographic (TomoSAR) imaging, allowing the detection of multiple scatterers that can exhibit time deformation and thermal dilation by using a CFAR (Constant False Alarm Rate) approach. In the last decade, several methods for TomoSAR have been proposed. The objective of this paper is to present the results obtained on high resolution tomographic SAR data of urban areas, by using a statistical test for detecting multiple scatterers that takes into account phase variations due to possible deformations and/or thermal dilation. The test can be evaluated in terms of probability of detection (PD) and probability of false alarm (PFA), and is based on an approximation of a Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT), denoted as Fast-Sup-GLRT. It was already applied and validated by the authors in the 3D case, while here it is extended and experimented in the 5D case. Numerical experiments on simulated and on StripMap TerraSAR-X (TSX) data have been carried out. The presented results show that the adopted method allows the detection of a large number of scatterers and the estimation of their position with a good accuracy, and that the consideration of the thermal dilation and surface deformation helps in recovering more single and double scatterers, with respect to the case in which these contributions are not taken into account. Moreover, the capability of method to provide reliable estimates of the deformations in urban structure suggests its use in structure stress monitoring.

Today there is a growing interest in automotive sensor monitoring systems. One of the main challenges is to make them an effective and valuable aid in dangerous situations, improving transportation safety. The main limitation of visual aid systems is that they do not produce accurate results in critical visibility conditions, such as in presence of rain, fog or smoke. Radar systems can greatly help in overcoming such limitations. In particular, imaging radar is gaining interest in the framework of Driver Assistance Systems (DAS). In this manuscript, a new methodology able to reconstruct the 3D imaged scene and to detect the presence of multiple targets within each line of sight is proposed. The technique is based on the use of Compressive Sensing (CS) theory and produces the estimation of multiple targets for each line of sight, their range distance and their reflectivities. Moreover, a fast approach for 2D focus based on the FFT algorithm is proposed. After the description of the proposed methodology, different simulated case studies are reported in order to evaluate the performances of the proposed approach.