• Journal of Forest and Environmental Science
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.233-242
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• 2014

Estimating above-ground biomass is important in establishing an applicable methodology of Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) System for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation-Plus (REDD+). We developed an estimation model of diameter at breast height (DBH) from IKONOS-2 image that led to above-ground biomass estimation (AGB). The IKONOS image was preprocessed with dark object subtraction and topographic effect correction prior to watershed segmentation for tree crown delineation. Compared to the field observation, the overall segmentation accuracy was 64%. Crown detection percent had a strong negative correlation to tree density. In addition, satellite-based crown area had the highest correlation with the field measured DBH. We then developed the DBH allometric model that explained 74% of the data variance. In average, the estimated DBH was very similar to the measured DBH as well as for AGB. Overall, this method can potentially be applied to estimate AGB over a relatively large and remote tropical forest in Northern Borneo.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_3
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• pp.819-834
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• 2022

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been effectively used for image classification, object detection, and image segmentation. Along with the recent advancement of computing power, deep learning models can build deeper and thicker networks and achieve better performance by creating more appropriate feature maps based on effective activation functions and optimizer algorithms. This review paper examined technical and academic trends of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Transformer models that are emerging techniques in remote sensing and suggested their utilization strategies and development directions. A timely supply of satellite images and real-time processing for deep learning to cope with disaster monitoring will be required for future work. In addition, a big data platform dedicated to satellite images should be developed and integrated with drone and Closed-circuit Television (CCTV) images.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_2
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• pp.685-694
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• 2022

Building information is essential for various urban spatial analyses. For this reason, continuous building monitoring is required, but it is a subject with many practical difficulties. To this end, research is being conducted to extract buildings from satellite images that can be continuously observed over a wide area. Recently, deep learning-based semantic segmentation techniques have been used. In this study, a part of the structure of the context-based ResU-Net was modified, and training was conducted to automatically extract a building from a 30 cm Worldview-3 RGB image using SpaceNet's building v2 free open data. As a result of the classification accuracy evaluation, the f1-score, which was higher than the classification accuracy of the 2nd SpaceNet competition winners. Therefore, if Worldview-3 satellite imagery can be continuously provided, it will be possible to use the building extraction results of this study to generate an automatic model of building around the world.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.395-409
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the classification performance and applicability when land cover datasets constructed for AI training are cross validation to other areas. For study areas, Gyeongsang-do and Jeolla-do in South Korea were selected as cross validation areas, and training datasets were obtained from AI-Hub. The obtained datasets were applied to the U-Net algorithm, a semantic segmentation algorithm, for each region, and the accuracy was evaluated by applying them to the same and other test areas. There was a difference of about 13-15% in overall classification accuracy between the same and other areas. For rice field, fields and buildings, higher accuracy was shown in the Jeolla-do test areas. For roads, higher accuracy was shown in the Gyeongsang-do test areas. In terms of the difference in accuracy by weight, the result of applying the weights of Gyeongsang-do showed high accuracy for forests, while that of applying the weights of Jeolla-do showed high accuracy for dry fields. The result of land cover classification, it was found that there is a difference in classification performance of existing datasets depending on area. When constructing land cover map for AI training, it is expected that higher quality datasets can be constructed by reflecting the characteristics of various areas. This study is highly scalable from two perspectives. First, it is to apply satellite images to AI study and to the field of land cover. Second, it is expanded based on satellite images and it is possible to use a large scale area and difficult to access.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.47-54
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• 2012

Additional high resolution satellite images, other period or site, are essential for efficient city modeling and analysis. However, the same ground objects have a radiometric inconsistency in different satellite images and it debase the quality of image processing and analysis. Moreover, in an urban area, buildings, trees, bridges, and other artificial objects cause shadow effects, which lower the performance of relative radiometric normalization. Therefore, in this study, we exclude shadow areas and suggest the selective histogram matching methods for image based application without supplementary digital elevation model or geometric informations of sun and sensor. We extract the shadow objects first using adjacency informations with the building edge buffer and spatial and spectral attributes derived from the image segmentation. And, Outlier objects like a asphalt roads are removed. Finally, selective histogram matching is performed from the shadow masked multi-temporal Quickbird-2 images.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.425-440
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• 2023

Monitoring water surface has become one of the most prominent areas of research in addressing environmental challenges.Accurate and automated detection of watersurface in remote sensing imagesis crucial for disaster prevention, urban planning, and water resource management, particularly for a country where water plays a vital role in human life. However, achieving precise detection poses challenges. Previous studies have explored different approaches,such as analyzing water indexes, like normalized difference water index (NDWI) derived from satellite imagery's visible or infrared bands and using k-means clustering analysis to identify land cover patterns and segment regions based on similar attributes. Nonetheless, challenges persist, notably distinguishing between waterspectralsignatures and cloud shadow or terrain shadow. In thisstudy, our objective is to enhance the precision of water surface detection by constructing a comprehensive water database (DB) using existing digital and land cover maps. This database serves as an initial assumption for automated water index analysis. We utilized 1:5,000 and 1:25,000 digital maps of Korea to extract water surface, specifically rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. Additionally, the 1:50,000 and 1:5,000 land cover maps of Korea aided in the extraction process. Our research demonstrates the effectiveness of utilizing a water DB product as our first approach for efficient water surface extraction from satellite images, complemented by our second and third approachesinvolving NDWI analysis and k-means analysis. The image segmentation and binary mask methods were employed for image analysis during the water extraction process. To evaluate the accuracy of our approach, we conducted two assessments using reference and ground truth data that we made during this research. Visual interpretation involved comparing our results with the global surface water (GSW) mask 60 m resolution, revealing significant improvements in quality and resolution. Additionally, accuracy assessment measures, including an overall accuracy of 90% and kappa values exceeding 0.8, further support the efficacy of our methodology. In conclusion, thisstudy'sresults demonstrate enhanced extraction quality and resolution. Through comprehensive assessment, our approach proves effective in achieving high accuracy in delineating watersurfaces from satellite images.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• v.2
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• pp.610-614
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• 2006

In this paper the advanced method of geodesic active contours was developed for the task of building detection from aerial and satellite images. Automatic extraction of man-made structures including buildings, building blocks or roads from remote sensing data is useful for land use mapping, scene understanding, robotic navigation, image retrieval, surveillance, emergency management procedures, cadastral etc. A level set method based on a region-driven segmentation model was implemented with which building boundaries were detected, through this curve propagation technique. The essence of this approach is to optimize the position and the geometric form of the curve by measuring information along that curve, and within the regions that compose the image partition. To this end, one can consider uniform intensities inside objects and the background. Thus, given an initial position of the curve, one can determine global, region-driven functions and provide a statistical description of the inside and outside object area. The calculus of variations and a gradient descent method was used to optimize the variational functional by an iterative steady state process. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of the proposed processing scheme.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.384-395
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• 2006

Topographical images such as aerial and satellite images are usually similar with respect to colors and textures but not in shapes. Thus shape features of the images and the methods of extracting them become critical for effective image retrieval from topographical image databases. In this paper, we propose a shape feature extraction method for topographical image retrieval. The method extracts a set of attributes which can model the presence of holes and disconnected regions in images and is tolerant to pre-processing, more specifically segmentation, errors. Various experiments suggest that retrieval using attributes extracted using the proposed method performs better than using existing shape feature extraction methods.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.1-11
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• 2000

Multi-temporal data have been used frequently for analyzing dynamic characteristics of ecological environment. Little research, however, shows the characteristics and problems of the analysis of continental- or global-scale, multi-temporal satellite data. This research investigated the characteristics of large-area, multi-temporal data analysis and the problems of phenological difference of ground vegetation and scarcity of training data for a long term period. This research suggested a latitudinal image segmentation method and an invariant pixel method. As an application, the image segmentation and invariant pixel methods were applied to a set of AVHRR data covering most part of Asia from 1982 to 1993. Fuzzy classification results showed the decrease of forests and the increase of croplands at densely populated areas, however an opposite trend was detected at sparsely populated or depopulated areas.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.545-554
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• 2019

This research aims to provide a building area extraction approach over the areas where data acquisition is impossible through field surveying, aerial photography and lidar scanning. Hence, high-resolution satellite images, which have high accessibility over the earth, are utilized for the automated building extraction in this study. 3D point clouds or DSM (Digital Surface Models), derived from the stereo image matching process, provides low quality of building area extraction due to their high level of noises and holes. In this regards, this research proposes a hybrid building area extraction approach which utilizes 3D point clouds (from image matching), and color and linear information (from imagery). First of all, ground and non-ground points are separated from 3D point clouds; then, the initial building hypothesis is extracted from the non-ground points. Secondly, color based building hypothesis is produced by considering the overlapping between the initial building hypothesis and the color segmentation result. Afterwards, line detection and space partitioning results are utilized to acquire the final building areas. The proposed approach shows 98.44% of correctness, 95.05% of completeness, and 1.05m of positional accuracy. Moreover, we see the possibility that the irregular shapes of building areas can be extracted through the proposed approach.