scholarly journals Automated Production of a Land Cover/Use Map of Europe Based on Sentinel-2 Imagery

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 3523
Author(s):  
Radek Malinowski ◽  
Stanisław Lewiński ◽  
Marcin Rybicki ◽  
Ewa Gromny ◽  
Małgorzata Jenerowicz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Data Processing ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Observation Data ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
Land Cover Maps ◽  
Sentinel 2

Up-to-date information about the Earth’s surface provided by land cover maps is essential for numerous environmental and land management applications. There is, therefore, a clear need for the continuous and reliable monitoring of land cover and land cover changes. The growing availability of high resolution, regularly collected remote sensing data can support the increasing number of applications that require high spatial resolution products that are frequently updated (e.g., annually). However, large-scale operational mapping requires a highly-automated data processing workflow, which is currently lacking. To address this issue, we developed a methodology for the automated classification of multi-temporal Sentinel-2 imagery. The method uses a random forest classifier and existing land cover/use databases as the source of training samples. In order to demonstrate its operability, the method was implemented on a large part of the European continent, with CORINE Land Cover and High-Resolution Layers as training datasets. A land cover/use map for the year 2017 was produced, composed of 13 classes. An accuracy assessment, based on nearly 52,000 samples, revealed high thematic overall accuracy (86.1%) on a continental scale, and average overall accuracy of 86.5% at country level. Only low-frequency classes obtained lower accuracies and we recommend that their mapping should be improved in the future. Additional modifications to the classification legend, notably the fusion of thematically and spectrally similar vegetation classes, increased overall accuracy to 89.0%, and resulted in ten, general classes. A crucial aspect of the presented approach is that it embraces all of the most important elements of Earth observation data processing, enabling accurate and detailed (10 m spatial resolution) mapping with no manual user involvement. The presented methodology demonstrates possibility for frequent and repetitive operational production of large-scale land cover maps.

scholarly journals Continental-Scale Land Cover Mapping at 10 m Resolution Over Europe (ELC10)

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 2301
Author(s):  
Zander Venter ◽  
Markus Sydenham
Keyword(s):  
Land Cover ◽  
Atmospheric Correction ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Tree Planting ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Classification Model ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
Land Cover Maps ◽  
Sentinel 2

Land cover maps are important tools for quantifying the human footprint on the environment and facilitate reporting and accounting to international agreements addressing the Sustainable Development Goals. Widely used European land cover maps such as CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) are produced at medium spatial resolutions (100 m) and rely on diverse data with complex workflows requiring significant institutional capacity. We present a 10 m resolution land cover map (ELC10) of Europe based on a satellite-driven machine learning workflow that is annually updatable. A random forest classification model was trained on 70K ground-truth points from the LUCAS (Land Use/Cover Area Frame Survey) dataset. Within the Google Earth Engine cloud computing environment, the ELC10 map can be generated from approx. 700 TB of Sentinel imagery within approx. 4 days from a single research user account. The map achieved an overall accuracy of 90% across eight land cover classes and could account for statistical unit land cover proportions within 3.9% (R2 = 0.83) of the actual value. These accuracies are higher than that of CORINE (100 m) and other 10 m land cover maps including S2GLC and FROM-GLC10. Spectro-temporal metrics that capture the phenology of land cover classes were most important in producing high mapping accuracies. We found that the atmospheric correction of Sentinel-2 and the speckle filtering of Sentinel-1 imagery had a minimal effect on enhancing the classification accuracy (< 1%). However, combining optical and radar imagery increased accuracy by 3% compared to Sentinel-2 alone and by 10% compared to Sentinel-1 alone. The addition of auxiliary data (terrain, climate and night-time lights) increased accuracy by an additional 2%. By using the centroid pixels from the LUCAS Copernicus module polygons we increased accuracy by <1%, revealing that random forests are robust against contaminated training data. Furthermore, the model requires very little training data to achieve moderate accuracies—the difference between 5K and 50K LUCAS points is only 3% (86 vs. 89%). This implies that significantly less resources are necessary for making in situ survey data (such as LUCAS) suitable for satellite-based land cover classification. At 10 m resolution, the ELC10 map can distinguish detailed landscape features like hedgerows and gardens, and therefore holds potential for aerial statistics at the city borough level and monitoring property-level environmental interventions (e.g., tree planting). Due to the reliance on purely satellite-based input data, the ELC10 map can be continuously updated independent of any country-specific geographic datasets.

scholarly journals Large-Scale High-Resolution Coastal Mangrove Forests Mapping Across West Africa With Machine Learning Ensemble and Satellite Big Data

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xue Liu ◽  
Temilola E. Fatoyinbo ◽  
Nathan M. Thomas ◽  
Weihe Wendy Guan ◽  
Yanni Zhan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Mangrove Forest ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Mangrove Forests ◽  
Data Products ◽  
Sentinel 2

Coastal mangrove forests provide important ecosystem goods and services, including carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and hazard mitigation. However, they are being destroyed at an alarming rate by human activities. To characterize mangrove forest changes, evaluate their impacts, and support relevant protection and restoration decision making, accurate and up-to-date mangrove extent mapping at large spatial scales is essential. Available large-scale mangrove extent data products use a single machine learning method commonly with 30 m Landsat imagery, and significant inconsistencies remain among these data products. With huge amounts of satellite data involved and the heterogeneity of land surface characteristics across large geographic areas, finding the most suitable method for large-scale high-resolution mangrove mapping is a challenge. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of a machine learning ensemble for mangrove forest mapping at 20 m spatial resolution across West Africa using Sentinel-2 (optical) and Sentinel-1 (radar) imagery. The machine learning ensemble integrates three commonly used machine learning methods in land cover and land use mapping, including Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), and Neural Network (NN). The cloud-based big geospatial data processing platform Google Earth Engine (GEE) was used for pre-processing Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 data. Extensive validation has demonstrated that the machine learning ensemble can generate mangrove extent maps at high accuracies for all study regions in West Africa (92%–99% Producer’s Accuracy, 98%–100% User’s Accuracy, 95%–99% Overall Accuracy). This is the first-time that mangrove extent has been mapped at a 20 m spatial resolution across West Africa. The machine learning ensemble has the potential to be applied to other regions of the world and is therefore capable of producing high-resolution mangrove extent maps at global scales periodically.

scholarly journals REVIEW OF HIGH-RESOLUTION GLOBAL LAND COVER

2021 ◽  
Vol XLIII-B4-2021 ◽  
pp. 175-182
Author(s):  
G. Bratic ◽  
A. Vavassori ◽  
M. A. Brovelli
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Accuracy Assessment ◽  
General Information ◽  
Tree Canopy ◽  
Global Land Cover ◽  
Tree Canopy Cover ◽  
Global Land ◽  
Land Cover Maps

Abstract. The land cover detection on our planet at high spatial resolution has a key role in many scientific and operational applications, such as climate modeling, natural resources management, biodiversity studies, urbanization analyses and spatial demography. Thanks to the progresses in Remote Sensing, accurate and high-resolution land cover maps have been developed over the last years, aiming at detecting the spatial resolution of different types of surfaces. In this paper we propose a review of the high-resolution global land cover products developed through Earth Observation technologies. A series of general information regarding imagery and data used to produce the map, the procedures employed for the map development and for the map accuracy assessment have been provided for every dataset. The land cover maps described in this paper concern the global distribution of settlements (Global Urban Footprint, Global Human Settlement Built-Up, World Settlement Footprint), water (Global Surface Water), forests (Forest/Non-forest, Tree canopy cover), and a two land cover maps describing world in 10 generic classes (GlobeLand30 and Finer Resolution Observation and Monitoring of Global Land Cover). The advantages and shortcomings of these maps and of the methods employed to produce them are summarized and compared in the conclusions.

Delineating fragmented grassland patches in the tropical region using multi-seasonal SAR and Optical Satellite Images

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhishek Samrat ◽  
M. S. Devy ◽  
Ganesh
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Cloud Computing ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Post Monsoon ◽  
Habitat Matrix ◽  
Semi Arid ◽  
Sentinel 2

Globally grasslands are declining and are in highly degraded conditions. In south Asia grasslands are neglected and treated as wastelands. They remain unprotected, highly fragmented, and poorly understood which has led to a loss of unique biodiversity and livelihoods. Mapping grasslands accurately is a challenge and current maps based on optical remote sensing often over- or underestimate grasslands in south Asia due to a prevalant complex landscape matrix, small patch sizes, and obscuring monsoonal clouds. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) fused with moderate spatial resolution has been used to delineate grasslands but, high-resolution, freely available ESA’s sentinel-1(SAR) and -2(optical) provides an opportunity to map small and fragmented patches that were not possible earlier with the publically available moderate or medium spatial resolution remote sensing dataset. Further, high resolution imageries require high computing power which is often limited with stand alone machines. Here we demonstrate that using cloud computing and optimal use of multi-seasonal imagery one can obtain a highly accurate land cover/use classification for a complex habitat matrix. We used freely accessible cloud computing platforms like Google Earth Engine (GEE) and land cover/use classification of sentinel-1 and -2. We compared the accuracy of grassland delineation between 1) seasonal (pre, during, and post-monsoon) sentinel-1, 2) post-monsoon sentinel-2, and 3) combined sentinel-1 and -2. We tested this method at two sites in a highly fragmented habitat matrix in semi-arid areas of Western and Southern India. The classification result has shown the overall accuracy of for the combined image was higher than only sentinel-2 and sentinel-1 alone for both sites. Grasslands habitat accuracy was also consistent with combined image classification across the sites. Our results identified newer grassland areas that coarse landuse management maps used by the government did not. The computation was done on a basic laptop and processing completed very quick. We, therefore, suggest that this novel approach of using cloud computing and optimal use of resource-hungry (computation and storage) high-resolution ESA’s sentinel-1 and -2 data, can be used to identify major land classes and small patchy grassland in the semi-arid regions of Asia and has the potential to map at continent level.

scholarly journals Land Cover Maps Production with High Resolution Satellite Image Time Series and Convolutional Neural Networks: Adaptations and Limits for Operational Systems

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 1986 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei Stoian ◽  
Vincent Poulain ◽  
Jordi Inglada ◽  
Victor Poughon ◽  
Dawa Derksen
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Neural Networks ◽  
Time Series ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Convolutional Neural Networks ◽  
Image Data ◽  
Operational Systems ◽  
Land Cover Maps ◽  
Sentinel 2

The Sentinel-2 satellite mission offers high resolution multispectral time-series image data, enabling the production of detailed land cover maps globally. When mapping large territories, the trade-off between processing time and result quality is a central design decision. Currently, this machine learning task is usually performed using pixel-wise classification methods. However, the radical shift of the computer vision field away from hand-engineered image features and towards more automation by representation learning comes with many promises, including higher quality results and less engineering effort. In particular, convolutional neural networks learn features which take into account the context of the pixels and, therefore, a better representation of the data can be obtained. In this paper, we assess fully convolutional neural network architectures as replacements for a Random Forest classifier in an operational context for the production of high resolution land cover maps with Sentinel-2 time-series at the country scale. Our contributions include a framework for working with Sentinel-2 L2A time-series image data, an adaptation of the U-Net model (a fully convolutional neural network) for dealing with sparse annotation data while maintaining high resolution output, and an analysis of those results in the context of operational production of land cover maps. We conclude that fully convolutional neural networks can yield improved results with respect to pixel-wise Random Forest classifiers for classes where texture and context are pertinent. However, this new approach shows higher variability in quality across different landscapes and comes with a computational cost which could be to high for operational systems.

scholarly journals Land Cover Maps Production with High Resolution Satellite Image Time Series and Convolutional Neural Networks: Adaptations and Limits for Operational Systems

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei Stoian ◽  
Vincent Poulain ◽  
Jordi Inglada ◽  
Victor Poughon ◽  
Dawa Derksen
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Time Series ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Convolutional Neural Networks ◽  
Satellite Image ◽  
Image Data ◽  
Design Decision ◽  
Land Cover Maps ◽  
Sentinel 2

The Sentinel-2 satellite mission offers high resolution multispectral time series image data, enabling the production of detailed land cover maps globally. At this scale, the trade-off between processing time and result quality is a central design decision. Currently, this machine learning task is usually performed using pixelwise classification methods. The radical shift of the computer vision field away from hand engineered image features and towards more automation by representation learning comes with many promises, including higher quality results and less engineering effort. In this paper we assess fully convolutional neural networks architectures as replacements for a Random Forest classifier in an operational context for the production of high resolution land cover maps with Sentinel-2 time series at the country scale. Our contributions include a framework for working with Sentinel-2 L2A time series image data, an adaptation of the U-Net model for dealing with sparse annotation data while maintaining high resolution output, and an analysis of those results in the context of operational production of land cover maps.

scholarly journals Accuracy Assessment of the FROM-GLC30 Land Cover Dataset Based on Watershed Sampling Units: A Continental-Scale Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 8435
Author(s):  
Zitian Guo ◽  
Chunmei Wang ◽  
Xin Liu ◽  
Guowei Pang ◽  
Mengyang Zhu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Reference Data ◽  
Accuracy Assessment ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Land Cover Types ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Land Type ◽  
Continental Scale

Land cover information plays an essential role in the study of global surface change. Multiple land cover datasets have been produced to meet various application needs. The FROM-GLC30 (Finer Resolution Observation and Monitoring of Global Land Cover) dataset is one of the latest land cover products with a resolution of 30 m, which is a relatively high resolution among global public datasets, and the accuracy of this dataset is of great concern in many related researches. The objective of this study was to calculate the accuracy of the FROM-GLC30 2017 dataset at the continental scale and to explore the spatial variation differences of each land type accuracy in different regions. In this study, the visual interpretation land cover results at 20,936 small watershed sampling units based on high-resolution remote sensing images were used as the reference data covering 65 countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa. The reference data were verified by field survey in typical watersheds. Based on that, the accuracy assessment of the FROM-GLC30 2017 dataset was carried out. The results showed (1) the area proportion of different land cover types in the FROM-GLC30 2017 dataset was generally consistent with that of the reference data. (2) The overall accuracy of the FROM-GLC30 2017 dataset was 72.78%, and was highest in West Asia–Northeast Africa, and lowest in South Asia. (3) Among all the seven land cover types, the accuracy of bareland and forest was relatively higher than that of others, and the accuracy of shrubland was the lowest. The accuracy for each land cover type differed among regions. The results of this work can provide useful information for land cover accuracy assessment researches at a large scale and promote the further practical applications of the open-source land cover datasets.

scholarly journals Land Cover Maps Production with High Resolution Satellite Image Time Series and Convolutional Neural Networks: Adaptations and Limits for Operational Systems

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei Stoian ◽  
Vincent Poulain ◽  
Jordi Inglada ◽  
Victor Poughon ◽  
Dawa Derksen
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Time Series ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Convolutional Neural Networks ◽  
Satellite Image ◽  
Image Data ◽  
Design Decision ◽  
Land Cover Maps ◽  
Sentinel 2

The Sentinel-2 satellite mission offers high resolution multispectral time series image data, enabling the production of detailed land cover maps globally. At this scale, the trade-off between processing time and result quality is a central design decision. Currently, this machine learning task is usually performed using pixelwise classification methods. The radical shift of the computer vision field away from hand engineered image features and towards more automation by representation learning comes with many promises, including higher quality results and less engineering effort. In this paper we assess fully convolutional neural networks architectures as replacements for a Random Forest classifier in an operational context for the production of high resolution land cover maps with Sentinel-2 time series at the country scale. Our contributions include a framework for working with Sentinel-2 L2A time series image data, an adaptation of the U-Net model for dealing with sparse annotation data while maintaining high resolution output, and an analysis of those results in the context of operational production of land cover maps.

scholarly journals A new European land systems representation accounting for landscape characteristics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue Dou ◽  
Francesca Cosentino ◽  
Ziga Malek ◽  
Luigi Maiorano ◽  
Wilfried Thuiller ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Use Change ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Landscape Characteristics ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
Land Systems ◽  
Land Cover Maps

Abstract Context While land use change is the main driver of biodiversity loss, most biodiversity assessments either ignore it or use a simple land cover representation. Land cover representations lack the representation of land use and landscape characteristics relevant to biodiversity modeling. Objectives We developed a comprehensive and high-resolution representation of European land systems on a 1-km2 grid integrating important land use and landscape characteristics. Methods Combining the recent data on land cover and land use intensities, we applied an expert-based hierarchical classification approach and identified land systems that are common in Europe and meaningful for studying biodiversity. We tested the benefits of using this map as compared to land cover information to predict the distribution of bird species having different vulnerability to landscape and land use change. Results Next to landscapes dominated by one land cover, mosaic landscapes cover 14.5% of European terrestrial surface. When using the land system map, species distribution models demonstrate substantially higher predictive ability (up to 19% higher) as compared to models based on land cover maps. Our map consistently contributes more to the spatial distribution of the tested species than the use of land cover data (3.9 to 39.1% higher). Conclusions A land systems classification including essential aspects of landscape and land management into a consistent classification can improve upon traditional land cover maps in large-scale biodiversity assessment. The classification balances data availability at continental scale with vital information needs for various ecological studies.

scholarly journals Classification of Very-High-Spatial-Resolution Aerial Images Based on Multiscale Features with Limited Semantic Information

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 364
Author(s):  
Han Gao ◽  
Jinhui Guo ◽  
Peng Guo ◽  
Xiuwan Chen
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
High Spatial Resolution ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Aerial Images ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Feature Representations ◽  
Object Based

Recently, deep learning has become the most innovative trend for a variety of high-spatial-resolution remote sensing imaging applications. However, large-scale land cover classification via traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with sliding windows is computationally expensive and produces coarse results. Additionally, although such supervised learning approaches have performed well, collecting and annotating datasets for every task are extremely laborious, especially for those fully supervised cases where the pixel-level ground-truth labels are dense. In this work, we propose a new object-oriented deep learning framework that leverages residual networks with different depths to learn adjacent feature representations by embedding a multibranch architecture in the deep learning pipeline. The idea is to exploit limited training data at different neighboring scales to make a tradeoff between weak semantics and strong feature representations for operational land cover mapping tasks. We draw from established geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) as an auxiliary module to reduce the computational burden of spatial reasoning and optimize the classification boundaries. We evaluated the proposed approach on two subdecimeter-resolution datasets involving both urban and rural landscapes. It presented better classification accuracy (88.9%) compared to traditional object-based deep learning methods and achieves an excellent inference time (11.3 s/ha).

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