scholarly journals Radiometric Calibration for Multispectral Camera of Different Imaging Conditions Mounted on a UAV Platform

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 978 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yahui Guo ◽  
J. Senthilnath ◽  
Wenxiang Wu ◽  
Xueqin Zhang ◽  
Zhaoqi Zeng ◽  
...  

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with multispectral cameras for remote sensing (RS) has provided new opportunities for ecological and agricultural related applications for modelling, mapping, and monitoring. However, when the multispectral images are used for the quantitative study, they should be radiometrically calibrated, which accounts for atmospheric and solar conditions by converting the digital number into a unit of scene reflectance that can be directly used in quantitative remote sensing (QRS). Indeed, some of the present applications using multispectral images are processed without precise calibration or with coarse calibration. The radiometric calibration of images from the UAV platform is quite difficult to perform, as the imaging condition is different for every single image. Thus, a standard procedure is necessary for a systematical radiometric calibration method to generate multispectral images with unit reflectance. Further, these images can be used to calculate vegetation indices, which are useful in monitoring vegetation phenology. These vegetation indices are considered as a potential screening tool to know the plant status, such as nitrogen, chlorophyll content, green leaf biomass, etc. This study focuses on a series of radiometric calibrations for multispectral images acquired from different flight altitudes, time instants, and weather conditions. Radiometric calibration for multispectral images is performed using the linear regression method (LRM). The main contribution involves (1) affirming the optimal calibration targets and assessing the atmospheric effects of different flights using the single scene of images; (2) to evaluate the effects of mosaic images with the LRM; (3) to propose and validate a universal calibration equation for the Mini Multiple Camera Array (MCA) 6 camera. The obtained results show that the three calibration targets, such as the dark, moderate, and white, are better for the Mini MCA 6 camera. The atmospheric effects increase with the increase of flight altitudes for each band, and the camera effect is of a fixed number. However, the camera effect and atmospheric attenuation to reflectance from different altitudes were relatively low considering the accuracy assessment. The performance measures namely, mean absolute deviation (indicated as V) and root mean square error (RMSE) between single and mosaic images show that the mosaic will not influence too much reflectance. The LRM performs well in all weather conditions. The universal calibration equation is suitable to apply to the images acquired during a sunny day and even with a little cloud.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 1410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suman Moparthy ◽  
Dominique Carrer ◽  
Xavier Ceamanos

The ability of spatial remote sensing in the visible domain to properly detect the slow transitions in the Earth’s vegetation is often a subject of debate. The reason behind this is that the satellite products often used to calculate vegetation indices such as surface albedo or reflectance, are not always correctly decontaminated from atmospheric effects. In view of the observed decline in vegetation over the Congo during the last decade, this study investigates how effectively satellite-derived variables can contribute to the answering of this question. In this study, we use two satellite-derived surface albedo products, three satellite-derived aerosol optical depth (AOD) products, two model-derived AOD products, and synthetic observations from radiative transfer simulations. The study discusses the important discrepancies (of up to 70%) found between these satellite surface albedo products in the visible domain over this region. We conclude therefore that the analysis of trends in vegetation properties based on satellite observations in the visible domain such as NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index), calculated from reflectance or albedo variables, is still quite questionable over tropical forest regions such as the Congo. Moreover, this study demonstrates that there is a significant increase (of up to 14%) in total aerosols within the last decade over the Congo. We note that if these changes in aerosol loads are not correctly taken into account in the retrieval of surface albedo, a greenness change of the surface properties (decrease of visible albedo) of around 8% could be artificially detected. Finally, the study also shows that neglecting strong aerosol emissions due to volcano eruptions could lead to an artificial increase of greenness over the Congo of more than 25% in the year of the eruptions and up to 16% during the 2–3 years that follow.


2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt D. Thelen ◽  
A. N. Kravchenko ◽  
Chad D. Lee

Experiments were conducted from 2000 to 2002 at two locations each year to determine if lactofen and imazethapyr injury to soybean could be detected using digital aerial imagery and ground-based optical remote sensing. Lactofen and imazethapyr were applied at base rates of 105 and 71 g/ha, respectively, and at 0, 2X, and 4X rates. Treated plots were evaluated between 7 and 21 d after treatment for crop injury using a ground-based radiometer and a system using computer analysis of digital aerial imagery. Both the ground-based radiometer and the digital aerial imagery were effective in detecting herbicide injury under most conditions. The digital aerial imagery system was found to be more sensitive in detecting herbicide injury than the ground-based radiometer system. Herbicide or herbicide rate had a significant effect on normalized differential vegetation indices (NDVI) derived from digital aerial imagery in four of four site-years. NDVI values derived from a multispectral ground-based radiometer were significant for herbicide or herbicide rate in four of six site-years. NDVI values from treated plots were subtracted from the NDVI value of the untreated check to generate a ΔNDVI. The resulting ΔNDVI values from the ground-based radiometer system were significant for herbicide or herbicide rate in six of six site-years. Neither optical remote-sensing system was effective at estimating actual application rates of lactofen and imazethapyr across a broad range of field and weather conditions due to temporal and spatial variability in crop response to the herbicides.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 792 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyang Xie ◽  
Bo Li ◽  
Xingxing Wei

Ship detection in multispectral remote-sensing images is critical in marine surveillance applications. The previously proposed ship-detection methods for multispectral satellite imagery usually work well under ideal conditions. When meeting complex environments such as shadows, mists, or clouds, they fail to detect ships. To solve this problem, we propose a novel spectral-reflectance-based ship-detection method. Research has shown that different materials have unique reflectance curves in the same spectral wavelength range. Based on this observation, we present a new feature using the reflectance gradient across multispectral bands. Moreover, we propose a neural network called lightweight fusion networks (LFNet). This network combines the aforementioned reflectance and the color information of multispectral images to jointly verify the regions with ships. The method utilizes a coarse-to-fine detection framework because of the large-sense-sparse-targets situation in remote-sensing images. In the coarse stage, the proposed reflectance feature vector is used to input the classifier to rule out the regions without ships. In fine detection, the LFNet is used to verify true ships. Compared with some traditional methods that merely depend on appearance features in images, the proposed method takes advantage of employing the reflectance variance in objects between each band as additional information. Extensive experiments have been conducted on multispectral images from four satellites under different weather and environmental conditions to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. The results show that our method can still achieve good performance even under harsh weather conditions.


Geosciences ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Zanni ◽  
Alessandro De Rosa

The present research is part of the project “From Aquileia to Singidunum: reconstructing the paths of the Roman travelers—RecRoad”, developed at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, thanks to a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. One of the goals of the project was to detect and reconstruct the Roman viability between the Roman cities of Aquileia (Aquileia, Italy) and Singidunum (Belgrade, Serbia), using different sources and methods, one of which is satellite remote sensing. The research project analyzed and combined several data, including images produced by the Sentinel-2 mission, funded by the European Commission Earth Observation Programme Copernicus, in which satellites were launched between 2015 and 2017. These images are freely available for scientific and commercial purposes, and constitute a constantly updated gallery of the whole planet, with a revisit time of five days at the Equator. The technical specifications of the satellites’ sensors are particularly suitable for archaeological mapping purposes, and their capacities in this field still need to be fully explored. The project provided a useful testbed for the use of Sentinel-2 images in the archaeological field. The study compares traditional Vegetation Indices with experimental trials on Sentinel images applied to the Srem District in Serbia. The paper also compares the results obtained from the analysis of the Sentinel-2 images with WorldView-2 multispectral images. The obtained results were verified through an archaeological surface survey.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-73
Author(s):  
Vijay Bhagat ◽  
Ajaykumar Kada ◽  
Suresh Kumar

Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) is an efficient tool to bridge the gap between high expensive satellite remote sensing, manned aerial surveys, and labors time consuming conventional fieldwork techniques of data collection. UAS can provide spatial data at very fine (up to a few mm) and desirable temporal resolution. Several studies have used vegetation indices (VIs) calculated from UAS based on optical- and MSS-datasets to model the parameters of biophysical units of the Earth surface. They have used different techniques of estimations, predictions and classifications. However, these results vary according to used datasets and techniques and appear very site-specific. These existing approaches aren’t optimal and applicable for all cases and need to be tested according to sensor category and different geophysical environmental conditions for global applications. UAS remote sensing is a challenging and interesting area of research for sustainable land management.


1983 ◽  
Vol 22 (23) ◽  
pp. 3751 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Y. Deschamps ◽  
M. Herman ◽  
D. Tanre

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 1994
Author(s):  
Qian Ma ◽  
Wenting Han ◽  
Shenjin Huang ◽  
Shide Dong ◽  
Guang Li ◽  
...  

This study explores the classification potential of a multispectral classification model for farmland with planting structures of different complexity. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing technology is used to obtain multispectral images of three study areas with low-, medium-, and high-complexity planting structures, containing three, five, and eight types of crops, respectively. The feature subsets of three study areas are selected by recursive feature elimination (RFE). Object-oriented random forest (OB-RF) and object-oriented support vector machine (OB-SVM) classification models are established for the three study areas. After training the models with the feature subsets, the classification results are evaluated using a confusion matrix. The OB-RF and OB-SVM models’ classification accuracies are 97.09% and 99.13%, respectively, for the low-complexity planting structure. The equivalent values are 92.61% and 99.08% for the medium-complexity planting structure and 88.99% and 97.21% for the high-complexity planting structure. For farmland with fragmentary plots and a high-complexity planting structure, as the planting structure complexity changed from low to high, both models’ overall accuracy levels decreased. The overall accuracy of the OB-RF model decreased by 8.1%, and that of the OB-SVM model only decreased by 1.92%. OB-SVM achieves an overall classification accuracy of 97.21%, and a single-crop extraction accuracy of at least 85.65%. Therefore, UAV multispectral remote sensing can be used for classification applications in highly complex planting structures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 3000
Author(s):  
Georg Zitzlsberger ◽  
Michal Podhorányi ◽  
Václav Svatoň ◽  
Milan Lazecký ◽  
Jan Martinovič

Remote-sensing-driven urban change detection has been studied in many ways for decades for a wide field of applications, such as understanding socio-economic impacts, identifying new settlements, or analyzing trends of urban sprawl. Such kinds of analyses are usually carried out manually by selecting high-quality samples that binds them to small-scale scenarios, either temporarily limited or with low spatial or temporal resolution. We propose a fully automated method that uses a large amount of available remote sensing observations for a selected period without the need to manually select samples. This enables continuous urban monitoring in a fully automated process. Furthermore, we combine multispectral optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from two eras as two mission pairs with synthetic labeling to train a neural network for detecting urban changes and activities. As pairs, we consider European Remote Sensing (ERS-1/2) and Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) for 1991–2011 and Sentinel 1 and 2 for 2017–2021. For every era, we use three different urban sites—Limassol, Rotterdam, and Liège—with at least 500km2 each, and deep observation time series with hundreds and up to over a thousand of samples. These sites were selected to represent different challenges in training a common neural network due to atmospheric effects, different geographies, and observation coverage. We train one model for each of the two eras using synthetic but noisy labels, which are created automatically by combining state-of-the-art methods, without the availability of existing ground truth data. To combine the benefit of both remote sensing types, the network models are ensembles of optical- and SAR-specialized sub-networks. We study the sensitivity of urban and impervious changes and the contribution of optical and SAR data to the overall solution. Our implementation and trained models are available publicly to enable others to utilize fully automated continuous urban monitoring.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 233
Author(s):  
Ilja Vuorinne ◽  
Janne Heiskanen ◽  
Petri K. E. Pellikka

Biomass is a principal variable in crop monitoring and management and in assessing carbon cycling. Remote sensing combined with field measurements can be used to estimate biomass over large areas. This study assessed leaf biomass of Agave sisalana (sisal), a perennial crop whose leaves are grown for fibre production in tropical and subtropical regions. Furthermore, the residue from fibre production can be used to produce bioenergy through anaerobic digestion. First, biomass was estimated for 58 field plots using an allometric approach. Then, Sentinel-2 multispectral satellite imagery was used to model biomass in an 8851-ha plantation in semi-arid south-eastern Kenya. Generalised Additive Models were employed to explore how well biomass was explained by various spectral vegetation indices (VIs). The highest performance (explained deviance = 76%, RMSE = 5.15 Mg ha−1) was achieved with ratio and normalised difference VIs based on the green (R560), red-edge (R740 and R783), and near-infrared (R865) spectral bands. Heterogeneity of ground vegetation and resulting background effects seemed to limit model performance. The best performing VI (R740/R783) was used to predict plantation biomass that ranged from 0 to 46.7 Mg ha−1 (mean biomass 10.6 Mg ha−1). The modelling showed that multispectral data are suitable for assessing sisal leaf biomass at the plantation level and in individual blocks. Although these results demonstrate the value of Sentinel-2 red-edge bands at 20-m resolution, the difference from the best model based on green and near-infrared bands at 10-m resolution was rather small.


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