• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.144-144
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• 2022

Identifying waterbody from remote sensing images, namely water detection, helps understand continuous redistribution of terrestrial water storage and accompanying hydrological processes. It also allows us to estimate available surface water resources and help effective water management. For this problem, NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) and MNDWI (Modified Normalized Difference Water Index) are widely used. Although remote sensing indexes can highlight remote sensing image in the water, the noise and the spatial information of the remote sensing image are difficult to be considered, so the accuracy is difficult to be compared with the visual interpretation (the most accurate method, but it requires a lot of labor, which makes it difficult to apply). In this study, we attempt to improve existing NDWI and MNDWI to better water detection. We establish waterbody database of South Korea first and then used it for assessing waterbody indices.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_3
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• pp.901-912
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• 2022

The frequency of disasters is increasing due to global climate change, and unusual heavy rains and rainy seasons are occurring in Korea. Periodic monitoring and rapid detection are important because these weather conditions can lead to drought and flooding, causing secondary damage. Although research using optical images is continuously being conducted to determine the waterbody, there is a limitation in that it is difficult to detect due to the influence of clouds in order to detect floods that accompany heavy rain. Therefore, there is a need for research using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that can be observed regardless of day or night in all weather. In this study, using Sentinel-1 SAR images that can be collected in near-real time as open data, the UNet model among deep learning algorithms that have recently been used in various fields was applied. In previous studies, waterbody detection studies using SAR images and deep learning algorithms are being conducted, but only a small number of studies have been conducted in Korea. In this study, to determine the applicability of deep learning of SAR images, UNet and the existing algorithm thresholding method were compared, and five indices and Sentinel-2 normalized difference water index (NDWI) were evaluated. As a result of evaluating the accuracy with intersect of union (IoU), it was confirmed that UNet has high accuracy with 0.894 for UNet and 0.699 for threshold method. Through this study, the applicability of deep learning-based SAR images was confirmed, and if high-resolution SAR images and deep learning algorithms are applied, it is expected that periodic and accurate waterbody change detection will be possible in Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.5_1
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• pp.1207-1214
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• 2021

In thisletter, we developed technology which can exclude effect of cloudsto perform remote waterbody detection based on Sentinel-2 optical satellite imagery to calculate the area of ungauged reservoirs and applied to the Hwanggang dam reservoir, a representative ungauged reservoir, to verify usability. The remote waterbody detection technology calculates the cloud blocking ratio by comparing the cloud boundary in the Sentinel-2 imagery and the reservoir boundary first. Next, itselects data whose cloud blocking ratio does not exceed a specific value and calculates NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) with selected imagery. In last, it calculatesthe area of the reservoir by counting the number of grids which have NDWI value considered as waterbody within the boundary of the target reservoir and correcting with cloud blocking ratio. To determine cloud blocking ratio threshold forselecting image, we performed the area calculation of Hwanggang dam reservoir from July 2018 to October 2021. As a result, when the cloud blocking ratio threshold wasset 10%, we confirmed that the result with large error due to clouds were filtered well and obtained 114 results that can show changes in Hwanggang dam reservoir area among 220 images.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_2
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• pp.793-810
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• 2022

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is considered to be suitable for near real-time inundation monitoring. The distinctly different intensity between water and land makes it adequate for waterbody detection, but the intrinsic speckle noise and variable intensity of SAR images decrease the accuracy of waterbody detection. In this study, we suggest two modules, named 'morphology module' and 'edge-enhanced module', which are the combinations of pooling layers and convolutional layers, improving the accuracy of waterbody detection. The morphology module is composed of min-pooling layers and max-pooling layers, which shows the effect of morphological transformation. The edge-enhanced module is composed of convolution layers, which has the fixed weights of the traditional edge detection algorithm. After comparing the accuracy of various versions of each module for U-Net, we found that the optimal combination is the case that the morphology module of min-pooling and successive layers of min-pooling and max-pooling, and the edge-enhanced module of Scharr filter were the inputs of conv9. This morphologic and edge-enhanced U-Net improved the F1-score by 9.81% than the original U-Net. Qualitative inspection showed that our model has capability of detecting small-sized waterbody and detailed edge of water, which are the distinct advancement of the model presented in this research, compared to the original U-Net.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.153-166
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• 2022

Waterstorage is one of the factorsthat most directly represent the amount of available water resources. Since the effects of drought can be more intuitively expressed, it is also used in variousstudies for drought evaluation. In a recent study, hydrological drought was evaluated through information on observing reservoirs with optical images. The short observation cycle and diversity of optical satellites provide a lot of data. However, there are some limitations because it is vulnerable to the influence of weather or the atmospheric environment. Therefore, thisstudy attempted to conduct a study on estimating the drought index using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image with relatively little influence from the observation environment. We produced the waterbody of Baekgok and Chopyeong reservoirs using SAR images of Sentinel-1 satellites and calculated the Reservoir Area Drought Index (RADI), a hydrological drought index. In order to validate the applicability of RADI to drought monitoring, it was compared with Reservoir Storage Drought Index (RSDI) based on measured storage. The two indices showed a very high correlation with the correlation coefficient, r=0.87, Area Under curve, AUC=0.97. These results show the possibility of regional-scale hydrological drought monitoring of SAR-based RADI. As the number of available SAR images increases in the future, it is expected that the utilization of drought monitoring will also increase.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.54 no.7
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• pp.535-544
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• 2021

Agricultural water occupies 48% of water demand, and management of agricultural reservoirs is essential for water resources management within agricultural basins. For more efficient use of agricultural water, monitoring the distribution of water resources in agricultural reservoirs and agricultural basins is required. Therefore, in this study, three threshold determination methods (i.e., fixed threshold, Otsu threshold, Kittler-Illingworth (KI) threshold) were compared to detect terrestrial water bodies using Sentinel-1 images for 3 years from 2018 to 2020. The purpose of this study was to evaluate methods for determining threshold values to more accurately estimate the reservoir area. In addition, by analyzing the relationship between the water surface and water storage at the Edong, Gosam, and Giheung reservoirs, water storage based on the SAR image was estimated and validated with observations. The thresholding method for detecting a waterbody was found to be the most accurate in the case of the KI threshold, and the water storage estimated by the KI threshold indicated a very high agreement (r = 0.9235, KGE' = 0.8691). Although the seasonal error characteristics were not observed, the problem of underestimation at high water levels may occur; the relationship between the water surface and the water storage could change rapidly. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the relationship between the water surface area and water storage through ground observation data for a more accurate estimation of water storage. If the use of SAR data through water resources satellites becomes possible in the future, based on the results of this study, it is judged that it will be beneficial for monitoring water storage and managing drought.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.6_1
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• pp.1709-1718
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• 2021

The waveform data of the Airborne Bathymetric LiDAR (ABL; LiDAR: Light Detection And Ranging) system provides data with improved accuracy, resolution, and reliability compared to the discrete-return data, and increases the user's control over data processing. Furthermore, we are able to extract additional information about the return signal. Waveform decomposition is a technique that separates each echo from the received waveform with a mixture of water surface and seabed reflections, waterbody backscattering, and various noises. In this study, a new waveform decomposition technique based on a Gaussian model was developed to improve the point extraction performance from the ABL waveform data. In the existing waveform decomposition techniques, the number of decomposed echoes and decomposition performance depend on the peak detection results because they use waveform peaks as initial values. However, in the study, we improved the approximation accuracy of the decomposition model by adding the estimated potential peak candidates to the initial peaks. As a result of an experiment using waveform data obtained from the East Coast from the Seahawk system, the precision of the decomposition model was improved by about 37% based on evaluating RMSE compared to the Gaussian decomposition method.

• 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.38 no.6_3
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• pp.1761-1775
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• 2022

Due to unpredictable climate change, the frequency of occurrence of water-related disasters and the scale of damage are also continuously increasing. In terms of disaster management, it is essential to identify the damaged area in a wide area and monitor for mid-term and long-term forecasting. In the field of water disasters, research on remote sensing technology using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite images for wide-area monitoring is being actively conducted. Time-series analysis for monitoring requires a complex preprocessing process that collects a large amount of images and considers the noisy radar characteristics, and for this, a considerable amount of time is required. With the recent development of cloud computing technology, many platforms capable of performing spatiotemporal analysis using satellite big data have been proposed. Google Earth Engine (GEE)is a representative platform that provides about 600 satellite data for free and enables semi real time space time analysis based on the analysis preparation data of satellite images. Therefore, in this study, immediate water disaster damage detection and mid to long term time series observation studies were conducted using GEE. Through the Otsu technique, which is mainly used for change detection, changes in river width and flood area due to river flooding were confirmed, centered on the torrential rains that occurred in 2020. In addition, in terms of disaster management, the change trend of the time series waterbody from 2018 to 2022 was confirmed. The short processing time through javascript based coding, and the strength of spatiotemporal analysis and result expression, are expected to enable use in the field of water disasters. In addition, it is expected that the field of application will be expanded through connection with various satellite bigdata in the future.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_1
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• pp.497-510
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• 2022

Agricultural reservoirs are essential structures for water supplies during dry period in the Korean peninsula, where water resources are temporally unequally distributed. For efficient water management, systematic and effective monitoring of medium-small reservoirs is required. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides a way for continuous monitoring of those, with its capability of all-weather observation. This study aims to evaluate the applicability of SAR in monitoring medium-small reservoirs using Sentinel-1 (10 m resolution) and Capella X-SAR (1 m resolution), at Chari (CR), Galjeon (GJ), Dwitgol (DG) reservoirs located in Ulsan, Korea. Water detected results applying Z fuzzy function-based threshold (Z-thresh) and Chan-vese (CV), an object detection-based segmentation algorithm, are quantitatively evaluated using UAV-detected water boundary (UWB). Accuracy metrics from Z-thresh were 0.87, 0.89, 0.77 (at CR, GJ, DG, respectively) using Sentinel-1 and 0.78, 0.72, 0.81 using Capella, and improvements were observed when CV was applied (Sentinel-1: 0.94, 0.89, 0.84, Capella: 0.92, 0.89, 0.93). Boundaries of the waterbody detected from Capella agreed relatively well with UWB; however, false- and un-detections occurred from speckle noises, due to its high resolution. When masked with optical sensor-based supplementary images, improvements up to 13% were observed. More effective water resource management is expected to be possible with continuous monitoring of available water quantity, when more accurate and precise SAR-based water detection technique is developed.