Cloud detection is a crucial preprocessing step for optical satellite remote sensing (RS) images. This article focuses on the cloud detection for RS imagery with cloud-snow coexistence and the utilization of the satellite thumbnails that lose considerable amount of high resolution and spectrum information of original RS images to extract cloud mask efficiently. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel cloud detection neural network with an encoder–decoder structure, named CDnetV2, as a series work on cloud detection. Compared with our previous CDnetV1, CDnetV2 contains two novel modules, that is, adaptive feature fusing model (AFFM) and high-level semantic information guidance flows (HSIGFs). AFFM is used to fuse multilevel feature maps by three submodules: channel attention fusion model (CAFM), spatial attention fusion model (SAFM), and channel attention refinement model (CARM). HSIGFs are designed to make feature layers at decoder of CDnetV2 be aware of the locations of the cloud objects. The high-level semantic information of HSIGFs is extracted by a proposed high-level feature fusing model (HFFM). By being equipped with these two proposed key modules, AFFM and HSIGFs, CDnetV2 is able to fully utilize features extracted from encoder layers and yield accurate cloud detection results. Experimental results on the ZY-3 satellite thumbnail data set demonstrate that the proposed CDnetV2 achieves accurate detection accuracy and outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.
Estimation of downward shortwave radiation (DSR) is of great importance in global energy budget and climatic modeling. Although various algorithms have been proposed, effective validation methods are absent for rugged terrains due to the lack of rigorous methodology and reliable field measurements. We propose a two-step validation method for rugged terrains based on computer simulations. The first step is to perform point-to-point validation at local scale. Time-series measurements were applied to evaluate a three-dimensional (3-D) radiative transfer model. The second step is to validate the DSR at pixel-scale. A semiempirical model was built up to interpolate and upscale the DSR. Key terrain parameters were weighted by empirical coefficients retrieved from ground-based observations. The optimum number and locations of ground stations were designed by the 3-D radiative transfer model and Monte Carlo method. Four ground stations were selected to upscale the ground-based observations. Additional three ground stations were set up to validate the interpolated results. The upscaled DSR was finally applied to validate the satellite products provided by MODIS and Himawari-8. The results showed that the modeled and observed DSR exhibited good consistency at point scale with correlation coefficients exceeding 0.995. The average error was around 20 W/m2 for the interpolated DSR and 10 W/m2 for the upscaled DSR in theory. The accuracies of the satellite products were acceptable at most times, with correlation coefficients exceeding 0.94. From an operational point of view, our method has an advantage of using small amount of ground stations to upscale DSR with relatively high accuracy over rugged terrains.
Clouds and cloud shadows heavily affect the quality of the remote sensing images and their application potential. Algorithms have been developed for detecting, removing, and reconstructing the shaded regions with the information from the neighboring pixels or multisource data. In this article, we propose an integrated cloud detection and removal framework using cascade convolutional neural networks, which provides accurate cloud and shadow masks and repaired images. First, a novel fully convolutional network (FCN), embedded with multiscale aggregation and the channel-attention mechanism, is developed for detecting clouds and shadows from a cloudy image. Second, another FCN, with the masks of the detected cloud and shadow, the cloudy image, and a temporal image as the input, is used for the cloud removal and missing-information reconstruction. The reconstruction is realized through a self-training strategy that is designed to learn the mapping between the clean-pixel pairs of the bitemporal images, which bypasses the high demand of manual labels. Experiments showed that our proposed framework can simultaneously detect and remove the clouds and shadows from the images and the detection accuracy surpassed several recent cloud-detection methods; the effects of image restoring outperform the mainstream methods in every indicator by a large margin. The data set used for cloud detection and removal is made open.
Pole-like objects provide important street infra- structure for road inventory and road mapping. In this article, we proposed a novel pole-like object extraction algorithm based on plane filtering from mobile Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data. The proposed approach is composed of two parts. In the first part, a novel octree-based split scheme was proposed to fit initial planes from off-ground points. The results of the plane fitting contribute to the extraction of pole-like objects. In the second part, we proposed a novel method of pole-like object extraction by plane filtering based on local geometric feature restriction and isolation detection. The proposed approach is a new solution for detecting pole-like objects from mobile LiDAR data. The innovation in this article is that we assumed that each of the pole-like objects can be represented by a plane. Thus, the essence of extracting pole-like objects will be converted to plane selecting problem. The proposed method has been tested on three data sets captured from different scenes. The average completeness, correctness, and quality of our approach can reach up to 87.66%, 88.81%, and 79.03%, which is superior to state-of-the-art approaches. The experimental results indicate that our approach can extract pole-like objects robustly and efficiently.
This article is focused on a challenging topic emerging from the registration of point clouds, specifically the registration of dynamic objects with low overlapping ratio. This problem is especially difficult when the static scanner is installed on a floating platform, and the objects it scans are also floating. These issues make most of the automatic registration methods and software solutions invalid. To solve this problem, explicit exploration of the static region is necessary for both the coarse and fine registration steps. Fortunately, determining the corresponding regions can be eased by the intuitive realization that in urban environments, natural objects neither present straight boundaries nor stack vertically. This intuition has guided the authors to develop a robust approach for the detection of static regions using planar structures. Then, silhouettes of the objects are extracted from the planar structures, which assist in the determination of an SE(2) transformation in the horizontal direction by a novel line matching method. The silhouettes also enable identification of the correspondences of planes in the step of fine registration using a variant of the iterative closest point method. Experimental evaluations using point clouds of cargo ships with different sizes and shapes reveal the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method, which gives 100% success and reasonable accuracy in rapid time, suitable for an online system. In addition, the proposed method is evaluated systematically with regard to several practical situations caused by the floating platform, and it demonstrates good robustness to limited scanning time and noise.
Accurate and efficient extraction of road marking plays an important role in road transportation engineering, automotive vision, and automatic driving. In this article, we proposed a dense feature pyramid network (DFPN)-based deep learning model, by considering the particularity and complexity of road marking. The DFPN concatenated its shallow feature channels with deep feature channels so that the shallow feature maps with high resolution and abundant image details can utilize the deep features. Thus, the DFPN can learn hierarchical deep detailed features. The designed deep learning model was trained end to end for road marking instance extraction with mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds. Then, we introduced the focal loss function into the optimization of deep learning model in road marking segmentation part, to pay more attention to the hard-classified samples with a large extent of background. In the experiments, our method can achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on instance segmentation of road markings, which illustrated the advantage of the proposed method.
In the last decades, 3-D object recognition has received significant attention. Particularly, in the presence of clutter and occlusion, 3-D object recognition is a challenging task. In this article, we present an object recognition pipeline to identify the objects from cluttered scenes. A highly descriptive, robust, and computationally efficient local shape descriptor (LSD) is first designed to establish the correspondences between a model point cloud and a scene point cloud. Then, a clustering method, which utilizes the local reference frames (LRFs) of the keypoints, is proposed to select the correct correspondences. Finally, an index is developed to verify the transformation hypotheses. The experiments are conducted to validate the proposed object recognition method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LSD holds high descriptor matching performance and the clustering method can well group the correct correspondences. The index is also very effective to filter the false transformation hypotheses. All these enhance the recognition performance of our method.
Precise extraction of ionospheric total electron content (TEC) observations with high precision is the precondition for establishing high-precision ionospheric TEC models. Nowadays, there are several ways to extract TEC observations, e.g., raw-code method (Raw-C), phase-leveled code method (PL-C), and undifferenced and uncombined precise point positioning method (UD-PPP); however, their accuracy is affected by multipath and noise. Considering the limitations of the three traditional methods, we try directly to use the phase observation based on zero-difference integer ambiguity to extract ionospheric observations, namely, PPP-Fixed method. The main goal of this work is to: 1) deduce the expression of ionospheric observables of these four extraction methods in a mathematical formula, especially the satellite and receiver hardware delays; 2) investigate the performance and precision of ionospheric observables extracted from different algorithms using two validation methods, i.e., the co-location experiment by calculating the single difference for each satellite, and the single-frequency PPP (SF-PPP) test by two co-location stations; and 3) use the short arc experiment to demonstrate the advantages of the PPP-Fixed method. The results show that single-difference mean errors of TEC extracted by PL-C, UD-PPP, and PPP-Fixed are 1.81, 0.59, and 0.15 TEC unit (TECU), respectively, and their corresponding maximum single-difference values are 5.12, 1.68, and 0.43 TECU, respectively. Compared with PL-C, the precision of the TEC observations extracted by the PPP-Fixed method is improved by 91.7%, while it is 67.3% for UD-PPP. The SF-PPP experiment shows that PPP-Fixed is the best among these methods in terms of convergence speed, correction accuracy, and reliability of positioning performance. Moreover, the PPP-Fixed method can achieve high accuracy even when the observed arc is short, e.g., within 40 mi-
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This article presents an adaptive hybrid-tracking (AHT) algorithm designed to process GNSS-R signals with a sufficient coherent component. Coherent GNSS-R signals have the potential to enable high-precision and high-resolution carrier-phase measurements for altimetry, sea-level monitoring, soil-moisture monitoring, flood mapping, snow–water equivalent measurements, and so on. The AHT algorithm incorporates the model inputs typically used in the master–slave open-loop (MS-OL) architecture into a closed-phase lock loop. Raw IF data recorded by the CYGNSS satellites over in-land water, land, and open-ocean surface are used to demonstrate the performance of the AHT. The results show that the AHT algorithm achieves comparable robustness with the MS-OL implementation while maintaining centimeter-level accuracy and excellent carrier-phase continuity that can be achieved with a fine-tuned Kalman filter (KF)-based adaptive closed-loop (ACL) system. Moreover, the AHT is suitable for real-time implementation and is applicable to other radio signals-of-opportunity.
In tunnel construction, to prevent the occurrence of water inrush, the geological conditions of faults and underground rivers must be determined in advance. As a direct detection method of groundwater, magnetic resonance sounding (MRS) has been applied for the advanced detection of water-related hazards in tunnels and mines recently. However, the results of conventional 1-D MRS cannot correctly reflect the spatial distribution characteristics of complicated water-bearing structures. In this article, we propose a measurement scheme using a rotating coil with separated transmitter and receiver loop configuration (SEP) for the 2-D imaging of water-bearing structures, such as faults and conduits. In this scheme, the receiver coil rotates several times, while the transmitter coil, which is separated from the receiver coil by a certain distance, remains stationary. Moreover, all the observed data participate in the inversion to achieve the 2-D magnetic resonance tomography (MRT). Numerical simulations of water-bearing faults are performed, and we compare and analyze the 2-D sensitivity and inversion results of two measurement schemes for a rotating coil, i.e., an overlapping transmitter and receiver loop configuration (OVE) and SEP. The results showed that the imaging results of the SEP are better than those of the OVE because the OVE imaging has a symmetric artifact. Finally, we discuss the influence of the transceiver distance, the resistivity, and the environmental noise on the imaging results. Moreover, the imaging results of the water-bearing conduit at different locations were obtained to validate the effectiveness of the SEP rotating coil measurement scheme.
The 3-D seismic data reconstruction can be understood as an underdetermined inverse problem, and thus, some additional constraints need to be provided to achieve reasonable results. A prevalent scheme in 3-D seismic data reconstruction is to compute the best low-rank approximation of a formulated Hankel matrix by rank-reduction methods with a rank constraint. However, the predefined Hankel structure is easily damaged by the low-rank approximation, which leads to harming its recovery performance. In this article, we present a structured tensor completion (STC) framework to simultaneously exploit both the Hankel structure and the low-tubal-rank constraint to further enhance the performance. Unfortunately, under the assumption of elementwise sampling used by existing methods, STC is intractable to be solved since Hankel constraints cannot be expressed as linear tensor equations. Instead, tubal sampling is proposed to describe the missing trace behavior more accurately and further build a bridge between tensor and matrix completion (MC) to overcome the solving issue in two aspects: through the bridge from tensor to MC, STC can be solved efficiently using MC from random samplings of each frontal slice in the Fourier domain. Through the bridge from matrix to tensor completion, various tensor models within the framework can be developed from noise-specific MC to meet the need for data reconstruction in changeable noise environments. Moreover, alternating-minimization and alternating-direction methods of multipliers are developed to solve the proposed STC. The superior performance of STC is demonstrated in both synthetic and field seismic data.
Full waveform inversion (FWI) is a powerful tool to understand the real complicated earth model. As FWI is a highly nonlinear problem and depends strongly on the initial model, how to effectively retrieve the large-scale background model is critical for the success of FWI. For elastic FWI (EFWI), the inversion challenge increases because the P-wave and S-wave are coupled together if no mode separation technologies are applied. In this article, we develop a new EFWI strategy, where we simultaneously implement the angle decomposition and mode separation for the wavefield. Based on the analysis of radiation patterns of different parameters and the fact that small scattering angles correspond to large-scale model perturbations, we can retrieve the large-scale background model of the P-wave velocity with pure small scattering angle P-P mode wavefield. On the other hand, the pure small scattering angle S-S, S-P, and P-S mode wavefields are used to estimate the large-scale background model of the S-wave velocity. The correctly retrieved large-scale background models further guarantee the success of subsequent fine structure retrieving for the P- and S-wave velocity models by using different wave modes. The proposed method is able to reduce the cycle-skipping problem and the multiparameter crosstalk problem simultaneously. Numerical examples show that the proposed method provides much improved inversion results than the conventional EFWI, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed method.
Seismic image, especially for the prestack image, performs a blurred version of the reflectivity image due to spatial aliasing, poor acquisition aperture, and nonuniform illumination. The blurring effects can be quantified by the point spread function (PSF). We herein adopt an explicit space-variant PSF formula, which can be defined as a sequential application of the modeling and migration operators with the asymptotic Green’s function. The deblurred images are restored using the nonstationary deconvolution with total variation regularization in which the blurred images are described by the convolution between the space-variant PSF and the reflectivity image. However, nonstationary deconvolution is computationally challenging. We introduce an extending primal–dual hybrid gradient (E-PDHG) method to decompose the complex problem into a sequence of simple subproblems that have closed-form solutions. Numerical results on synthetic data and field data demonstrate that the proposed E-PDHG method outperforms the basic PDHG method in the prestack seismic image deblurring.
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Over the past few years making use of deep networks, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), classifying hyperspectral images has progressed significantly and gained increasing attention. In spite of being successful, these networks need an adequate supply of labeled training instances for supervised learning, which, however, is quite costly to collect. On the other hand, unlabeled data can be accessed in almost arbitrary amounts. Hence it would be conceptually of great interest to explore networks that are able to exploit labeled and unlabeled data simultaneously for hyperspectral image classification. In this article, we propose a novel graph-based semisupervised network called nonlocal graph convolutional network (nonlocal GCN). Unlike existing CNNs and RNNs that receive pixels or patches of a hyperspectral image as inputs, this network takes the whole image (including both labeled and unlabeled data) in. More specifically, a nonlocal graph is first calculated. Given this graph representation, a couple of graph convolutional layers are used to extract features. Finally, the semisupervised learning of the network is done by using a cross-entropy error over all labeled instances. Note that the nonlocal GCN is end-to-end trainable. We demonstrate in extensive experiments that compared with state-of-the-art spectral classifiers and spectral–spatial classification networks, the nonlocal GCN is able to offer competitive results and high-quality classification maps (with fine boundaries and without noisy scattered points of misclassification).
