• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1283-1297
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• 2023

Mid-wave infrared (MWIR) imagery, due to its ability to capture the temperature of land cover and objects, serves as a crucial data source in various fields including environmental monitoring and defense. The KOMPSAT-3A satellite acquires MWIR imagery with high spatial resolution compared to other satellites. However, the limited spatial resolution of MWIR imagery, in comparison to electro-optical (EO) imagery, constrains the optimal utilization of the KOMPSAT-3A data. This study aims to create a highly visible MWIR fusion image by leveraging the edge information from the KOMPSAT-3A panchromatic (PAN) image. Preprocessing is implemented to mitigate the relative geometric errors between the PAN and MWIR images. Subsequently, we employ a pre-trained pixel difference network (PiDiNet), a deep learning-based edge information extraction technique, to extract the boundaries of objects from the preprocessed PAN images. The MWIR fusion imagery is then generated by emphasizing the brightness value corresponding to the edge information of the PAN image. To evaluate the proposed method, the MWIR fusion images were generated in three different sites. As a result, the boundaries of terrain and objects in the MWIR fusion images were emphasized to provide detailed thermal information of the interest area. Especially, the MWIR fusion image provided the thermal information of objects such as airplanes and ships which are hard to detect in the original MWIR images. This study demonstrated that the proposed method could generate a single image that combines visible details from an EO image and thermal information from an MWIR image, which contributes to increasing the usage of MWIR imagery.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1211-1224
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• 2023

Clouds cause many difficult problems in observing land surface phenomena using optical satellites, such as national land observation, disaster response, and change detection. In addition, the presence of clouds affects not only the image processing stage but also the final data quality, so it is necessary to identify and remove them. Therefore, in this study, we developed a new cloud detection technique that automatically performs a series of processes to search and extract the pixels closest to the spectral pattern of clouds in satellite images, select the optimal threshold, and produce a cloud mask based on the threshold. The cloud detection technique largely consists of three steps. In the first step, the process of converting the Digital Number (DN) unit image into top-of-atmosphere reflectance units was performed. In the second step, preprocessing such as Hue-Value-Saturation (HSV) transformation, triangle thresholding, and maximum likelihood classification was applied using the top of the atmosphere reflectance image, and the threshold for generating the initial cloud mask was determined for each image. In the third post-processing step, the noise included in the initial cloud mask created was removed and the cloud boundaries and interior were improved. As experimental data for cloud detection, CAS500-1 L2G images acquired in the Korean Peninsula from April to November, which show the diversity of spatial and seasonal distribution of clouds, were used. To verify the performance of the proposed method, the results generated by a simple thresholding method were compared. As a result of the experiment, compared to the existing method, the proposed method was able to detect clouds more accurately by considering the radiometric characteristics of each image through the preprocessing process. In addition, the results showed that the influence of bright objects (panel roofs, concrete roads, sand, etc.) other than cloud objects was minimized. The proposed method showed more than 30% improved results(F1-score) compared to the existing method but showed limitations in certain images containing snow.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_3
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• pp.1779-1790
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• 2023

Satellite-based fog detection algorithms are being developed to detect fog in real-time over a wide area, with a focus on the Korean Peninsula (KorPen). The GEO-KOMPSAT-2A/Advanced Meteorological Imager (GK2A/AMI, GK2A) satellite offers an excellent temporal resolution (10 min) and a spatial resolution (500 m), while GEO-KOMPSAT-2B/Geostationary Ocean Color Imager-II (GK2B/GOCI-II, GK2B) provides an excellent spatial resolution (250 m) but poor temporal resolution (1 h) with only visible channels. To enhance the fog detection level (10 min, 250 m), we developed a fused GK2AB fog detection algorithm (FDA) of GK2A and GK2B. The GK2AB FDA comprises three main steps. First, the Korea Meteorological Satellite Center's GK2A daytime fog detection algorithm is utilized to detect fog, considering various optical and physical characteristics. In the second step, GK2B data is extrapolated to 10-min intervals by matching GK2A pixels based on the closest time and location when GK2B observes the KorPen. For reflectance, GK2B normalized visible (NVIS) is corrected using GK2A NVIS of the same time, considering the difference in wavelength range and observation geometry. GK2B NVIS is extrapolated at 10-min intervals using the 10-min changes in GK2A NVIS. In the final step, the extrapolated GK2B NVIS, solar zenith angle, and outputs of GK2A FDA are utilized as input data for machine learning (decision tree) to develop the GK2AB FDA, which detects fog at a resolution of 250 m and a 10-min interval based on geographical locations. Six and four cases were used for the training and validation of GK2AB FDA, respectively. Quantitative verification of GK2AB FDA utilized ground observation data on visibility, wind speed, and relative humidity. Compared to GK2A FDA, GK2AB FDA exhibited a fourfold increase in spatial resolution, resulting in more detailed discrimination between fog and non-fog pixels. In general, irrespective of the validation method, the probability of detection (POD) and the Hanssen-Kuiper Skill score (KSS) are high or similar, indicating that it better detects previously undetected fog pixels. However, GK2AB FDA, compared to GK2A FDA, tends to over-detect fog with a higher false alarm ratio and bias.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_2
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• pp.1553-1563
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• 2023

The Geostationary Ocean Color Imager-II (GOCI-II) is a satellite designed for ocean color observation, covering the Northeast Asian region and the entire disk of the Earth. It commenced operations in 2020, succeeding its predecessor, GOCI, which had been active for the previous decade. In this study, we aimed to enhance the atmospheric correction algorithm, a critical step in producing satellite-based ocean color data, by performing cross-calibration on the GOCI-II near-infrared (NIR) band using the GOCI NIR band. To achieve this, we conducted a cross-calibration study on the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiance of the NIR band and derived a vicarious calibration gain for two NIR bands (745 and 865 nm). As a result of applying this gain, the offset of two sensors decreased and the ratio approached 1. It shows that consistency of two sensors was improved. Also, the Rayleigh-corrected reflectance at 745 nm and 865 nm increased by 5.62% and 9.52%, respectively. This alteration had implications for the ratio of Rayleigh-corrected reflectance at these wavelengths, potentially impacting the atmospheric correction results across all spectral bands, particularly during the aerosol reflectance correction process within the atmospheric correction algorithm. Due to the limited overlapping operational period of GOCI and GOCI-II satellites, we only used data from March 2021. Nevertheless, we anticipate further enhancements through ongoing cross-calibration research with other satellites in the future. Additionally, it is essential to apply the vicarious calibration gain derived for the NIR band in this study to perform vicarious calibration for the visible channels and assess its impact on the accuracy of the ocean color products.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_2
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• pp.1635-1650
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• 2023

Under global warming, the steadily increasing sea surface temperature (SST) severely impacts marine ecosystems,such as the productivity decrease and change in marine species distribution. Recently, the catch of Todarodes Pacificus, one of South Korea's primary marine resources, has dramatically decreased. In this study, we analyze the marine environment that affects the formation of fishing grounds of Todarodes Pacificus and develop seasonal habitat suitability index (HSI) models based on various satellite data including Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) data to continuously manage fisheries resources over Korean exclusive economic zone. About 83% of catches are found within the range of SST of 14.11-26.16℃,sea level height of 0.56-0.82 m, chlorophyll-a concentration of 0.31-1.52 mg m^-3, and primary production of 580.96-1574.13 mg C m^-2 day^-1. The seasonal HSI models are developed using the Arithmetic Mean Model, which showed the best performance. Comparing the developed HSI value with the 2019 catch data, it is confirmed that the HSI model is valid because the fishing grounds are formed in different sea regions by season (East Sea in winter and Yellow Sea in summer) and the high HSI (> 0.6) concurrences to areas with the high catch. In addition, we identified the significant increasing trend in SST over study regions, which is highly related to the formation of fishing grounds of Todarodes Pacificus. We can expect the fishing grounds will be changed by accelerating ocean warming in the future. Continuous HSI monitoring is necessary to manage fisheries' spatial and temporal distribution.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_2
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• pp.1605-1613
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• 2023

The physical properties of the ocean interior are determined by temperature and salinity. To observe them, we rely on satellite observations for broad regions of oceans. However, the satellite for salinity measurement, Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), has low temporal and spatial resolutions; thus, more is needed to resolve the fast-changing coastal environment. To overcome these limitations, the algorithm to use the Geostationary Ocean Color Imager-II (GOCI-II) of the Geo-Kompsat-2B (GK-2B) was developed as the inputs for a Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network (MPNN). The result shows that coefficient of determination (R²), root mean square error (RMSE), and relative root mean square error (RRMSE) between GOCI-II based sea surface salinity (SSS) (GOCI-II SSS) and SMAP was 0.94, 0.58 psu, and 1.87%, respectively. Furthermore, the spatial variation of GOCI-II SSS was also very uniform, with over 0.8 of R² and less than 1 psu of RMSE. In addition, GOCI-II SSS was also compared with SSS of Ieodo Ocean Research Station (I-ORS), suggesting that the result was slightly low, which was further analyzed for the following reasons. We further illustrated the valuable information of high spatial and temporal variation of GOCI-II SSS to analyze SSS variation by the 11th typhoon, Hinnamnor, in 2022. We used the mean and standard deviation (STD) of one day of GOCI-II SSS, revealing the high spatial and temporal changes. Thus, this study will shed light on the research for monitoring the highly changing marine environment.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_2
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• pp.811-825
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• 2023

In accordance with the government's stance of actively promoting intelligent administrative service policies through data utilization, in the disaster and safety management field, it also is proceeding with disaster and safety management policies utilizing data and constructing systems for responding efficiently to new and complex disasters and establishing scientific and systematic safety policies. However, it is difficult to quickly and accurately grasp the on-site situation in the event of a disaster, and there are still limitations in providing information necessary for situation judgment and response only by displaying vast data. This paper focuses on deriving specific needs to make disaster situation management work more intelligent and efficient by utilizing intelligent information technology. Through individual interviews with workers at the Central Disaster and Safety Status Control Center, we investigated the scope of disaster situation management work and the main functions and usability of the geographic information system (GIS)-based integrated situation management system by practitioners in this process. In addition, the data built in the system was reclassified according to purpose and characteristics to check the status of data in the GIS-based integrated situation management system. To derive needed to make disaster situation management more intelligent and efficient by utilizing intelligent information technology, 3 strategies were established to quickly and accurately identify on-site situations, make data-based situation judgments, and support efficient situation management tasks, and implementation tasks were defined and task priorities were determined based on the importance of implementation tasks through analytic hierarchy process (AHP) analysis. As a result, 24 implementation tasks were derived, and to make situation management efficient, it is analyzed that the use of intelligent information technology is necessary for collecting, analyzing, and managing video and sensor data and tasks that can take a lot of time of be prone to errors when performed by humans, that is, collecting situation-related data and reporting tasks. We have a conclusion that among situation management intelligence strategies, we can perform to develop technologies for strategies being high important score, that is, quickly and accurately identifying on-site situations and efficient situation management work support.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_3
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• pp.949-965
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• 2023

In this study, we propose a method to monitor the surface area of agricultural reservoirs in South Korea using Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar images and the deep learning model, Swin Transformer. Utilizing the Google Earth Engine platform, datasets from 2017 to 2021 were constructed for seven agricultural reservoirs, categorized into 700 K-ton, 900 K-ton, and 1.5 M-ton capacities. For four of the reservoirs, a total of 1,283 images were used for model training through shuffling and 5-fold cross-validation techniques. Upon evaluation, the Swin Transformer Large model, configured with a window size of 12, demonstrated superior semantic segmentation performance, showing an average accuracy of 99.54% and a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 95.15% for all folds. When the best-performing model was applied to the datasets of the remaining three reservoirsfor validation, it achieved an accuracy of over 99% and mIoU of over 94% for all reservoirs. These results indicate that the Swin Transformer model can effectively monitor the surface area of agricultural reservoirs in South Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_3
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• pp.979-995
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• 2023

As wildfires are difficult to predict, real-time monitoring is crucial for a timely response. Geostationary satellite images are very useful for active fire detection because they can monitor a vast area with high temporal resolution (e.g., 2 min). Existing satellite-based active fire detection algorithms detect thermal outliers using threshold values based on the statistical analysis of brightness temperature. However, the difficulty in establishing suitable thresholds for such threshold-based methods hinders their ability to detect fires with low intensity and achieve generalized performance. In light of these challenges, machine learning has emerged as a potential-solution. Until now, relatively simple techniques such as random forest, Vanilla convolutional neural network (CNN), and U-net have been applied for active fire detection. Therefore, this study proposed an active fire detection algorithm using state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning techniques using data from the Advanced Himawari Imager and evaluated it over East Asia and Australia. The SOTA model was developed by applying EfficientNet and lion optimizer, and the results were compared with the model using the Vanilla CNN structure. EfficientNet outperformed CNN with F1-scores of 0.88 and 0.83 in East Asia and Australia, respectively. The performance was better after using weighted loss, equal sampling, and image augmentation techniques to fix data imbalance issues compared to before the techniques were used, resulting in F1-scores of 0.92 in East Asia and 0.84 in Australia. It is anticipated that timely responses facilitated by the SOTA deep learning-based approach for active fire detection will effectively mitigate the damage caused by wildfires.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_4
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• pp.1097-1109
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• 2023

Urban is an area where small-scale changes to individual buildings occur frequently. An existing urban building database requires periodic updating to increase its usability. However, there are limitations in data collection for building changes over a wide urban. In this study, we check the possibility of detecting building changes and updating a building database by using satellite images that can capture a wide urban region by a single image. For this purpose, building areas in a satellite image are first extracted by projecting 3D coordinates of building corners available in a building database onto the image. Building areas are then divided into roof and facade areas. By comparing textures of the roof areas projected, building changes such as height change or building removal can be detected. New height values are estimated by adjusting building heights until projected roofs align to actual roofs observed in the image. If the projected image appeared in the image while no building is observed, it corresponds to a demolished building. By checking buildings in the original image whose roofs and facades areas are not projected, new buildings are identified. Based on these results, the building database is updated by the three categories of height update, building deletion, or new building creation. This method was tested with a KOMPSAT-3A image over Incheon Metropolitan City and Incheon building database available in public. Building change detection and building database update was carried out. Updated building corners were then projected to another KOMPSAT-3 image. It was confirmed that building areas projected by updated building information agreed with actual buildings in the image very well. Through this study, the possibility of semi-automatic building change detection and building database update based on single satellite image was confirmed. In the future, follow-up research is needed on technology to enhance computational automation of the proposed method.