• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.121-133
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• 2021

Suspended Solids (SS) generated in rivers are mainly introduced from non-point pollutants or appear naturally in the water body, and are an important water quality factor that may cause long-term water pollution by being deposited. However, the conventional method of measuring the concentration of suspended solids is labor-intensive, and it is difficult to obtain a vast amount of data via point measurement. Therefore, in this study, a model for measuring the concentration of suspended solids based on remote sensing in the Nakdong River was developed using Sentinel-2 data that provides high-resolution multi-spectral satellite images. The proposed model considers the spectral bands and band ratios of various wavelength bands using a machine learning model, Support Vector Regression (SVR), to overcome the limitation of the existing remote sensing-based regression equations. The optimal combination of variables was derived using the Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) and weight coefficients for each variable of SVR. The results show that the 705nm band belonging to the red-edge wavelength band was estimated as the most important spectral band, and the proposed SVR model produced the most accurate measurement compared with the previous regression equations. By using the RFE, the SVR model developed in this study reduces the variable dependence compared to the existing regression equations based on the single spectral band or band ratio and provides more accurate prediction of spatial distribution of suspended solids concentration.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_1
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• pp.1489-1503
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• 2022

Drone and sensor technologies are enabling digitalization of agricultural crop's growth information and accelerating the development of the precision agriculture. These technologies could be able to assess damage of crops when natural disaster occurs, and contribute to the scientification of the crop insurance assessment method, which is being conducted through field survey. This study was aimed to calculate lodged damage rate from the vegetation indices extracted by drone based RGB images for soybean. Support Vector Classifier (SVC) models were considered by adding vegetation indices to the Crop Surface Model (CSM) based lodged damage rate. Visible Atmospherically Resistant Index (VARI) and Green Red Vegetation Index (GRVI) based lodged damage rate classification were shown the highest accuracy score as 0.709 and 0.705 each. As a result of this study, it was confirmed that drone based RGB images can be used as a useful tool for estimating the rate of lodged damage. The result acquired from this study can be used to the satellite imagery like Sentinel-2 and RapidEye when the damages from the natural disasters occurred.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_1
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• pp.1357-1369
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• 2022

Cloud removal is an essential image processing step for any task requiring time-series optical images, such as vegetation monitoring and change detection. This paper presents a two-stage cloud removal method that combines conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) with regression-based calibration to construct a cloud-free time-series optical image set. In the first stage, the cGANs generate initial prediction results using quantitative relationships between optical and synthetic aperture radar images. In the second stage, the relationships between the predicted results and the actual values in non-cloud areas are first quantified via random forest-based regression modeling and then used to calibrate the cGAN-based prediction results. The potential of the proposed method was evaluated from a cloud removal experiment using Sentinel-2 and COSMO-SkyMed images in the rice field cultivation area of Gimje. The cGAN model could effectively predict the reflectance values in the cloud-contaminated rice fields where severe changes in physical surface conditions happened. Moreover, the regression-based calibration in the second stage could improve the prediction accuracy, compared with a regression-based cloud removal method using a supplementary image that is temporally distant from the target image. These experimental results indicate that the proposed method can be effectively applied to restore cloud-contaminated areas when cloud-free optical images are unavailable for environmental monitoring.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_3
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• pp.1749-1760
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• 2022

In modern society, human and social damages caused by natural disasters and frequent disaster accidents have been increased year by year. Prompt access to dangerous disaster sites that are inaccessible or inaccessible using state-of-the-art Earth observation equipment such as satellites, drones, and survey robots, and timely collection and analysis of meaningful disaster information. It can play an important role in protecting people's property and life throughout the entire disaster management cycle, such as responding to disaster sites and establishing mid-to long-term recovery plans. This special issue introduces the National Disaster Management Research Institute (NDMI)'s disaster management technology that utilizes various Earth observation platforms, such as mobile survey vehicles equipped with close-range disaster site survey sensors, drones, and survey robots, as well as satellite technology, which is a tool of remote earth observation. Major research achievements include detection of damage from water disasters using Google Earth Engine, mid- and long-term time series observation, detection of reservoir water bodies using Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images and artificial intelligence, analysis of resident movement patterns in case of forest fire disasters, and data analysis of disaster safety research. Efficient integrated management and utilization plan research results are summarized. In addition, research results on scientific investigation activities on the causes of disasters using drones and survey robots during the investigation of inaccessible and dangerous disaster sites were described.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_3
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• pp.1777-1788
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• 2022

The reservoir is a major water supply source in the domestic agricultural environment, and the monitoring of water storage of reservoirs is important for the utilization and management of agricultural water resource. Remote sensing via satellite imagery can be an effective method for regular monitoring of widely distributed objects such as reservoirs, and in this study, image classification and image segmentation algorithms are applied to Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery for water body detection in 53 reservoirs in South Korea. Six algorithms are used: Neural Network (NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Otsu, Watershed (WS), and Chan-Vese (CV), and the results of water body detection are evaluated with in-situ images taken by drones. The correlations between the in-situ water surface area and detected water surface area from each algorithm are NN 0.9941, SVM 0.9942, RF 0.9940, Otsu 0.9922, WS 0.9709, and CV 0.9736, and the larger the scale of reservoir, the higher the linear correlation was. WS showed low recall due to the undetected water bodies, and NN, SVM, and RF showed low precision due to over-detection. For water body detection through SAR imagery, we found that aquatic plants and artificial structures can be the error factors causing undetection of water body.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_4
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• pp.1935-1943
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• 2022

The development and application of a high-resolution soil moisture mapping method using satellite imagery has been considered one of the major research themes in remote sensing. In this study, soil moisture mapping in the test area of Jeju Island was performed. The soil moisture was calculated with optical images using linearly adjusted Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) polarization images and incident angle. SAR Backscatter data, Analysis Ready Data (ARD) provided by Google Earth Engine (GEE), was used. In the soil moisture processing process, the optical image was applied to normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) by surface reflectance of KOMPSAT-3 satellite images and the land cover map of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). When the SAR image and the optical images are fused, the reliability of the soil moisture product can be improved. To validate the soil moisture mapping product, a comparative analysis was conducted with normalized difference water index (NDWI) products by the KOMPSAT-3 image and those of the Landsat-8 satellite. As a result, it was shown that the soil moisture map and NDWI of the study area were slightly negative correlated, whereas NDWI using the KOMPSAT-3 images and the Landsat-8 satellite showed a highly correlated trend. Finally, it will be possible to produce precise soil moisture using KOMPSAT optical images and KOMPSAT SAR images without other external remotely sensed images, if the soil moisture calculation algorithm used in this study is further developed for the KOMPSAT-5 image.

• 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.

• Ecology and Resilient Infrastructure
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.218-227
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• 2022

This study attempted classification through deep learning-based image training for land cover classification in river spaces which is one of the important data for efficient river management. For this purpose, land cover classification analysis with the RGB image of the target section based on the category classification index of major land cover map was conducted by using the learning outcomes from the result of labeling. In addition, land cover classification of the river spaces was performed by unsupervised and supervised classification from Sentinel-2 satellite images provided in an open format, and this was compared with the results of deep learning-based image classification. As a result of the analysis, it showed more accurate prediction results compared to unsupervised classification results, and it presented significantly improved classification results in the case of high-resolution images. The result of this study showed the possibility of classifying water areas and wetlands in the river spaces, and if additional research is performed in the future, the deep learning based image train method for the land cover classification could be used for river management.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.311-326
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• 2022

The Compact Advanced Satellite 500-4 (CAS500-4) is under development to efficiently manage and monitor forests in Korea and is scheduled to launch in 2025. The National Institute of Forest Science is developing 36 types of forestry applications to utilize the CAS500-4 efficiently. The products derived using the remote sensing method require validation with ground reference data, and the quality monitoring results for the products must be continuously reported. Due to it being the first time developing the national forestry satellite, there is no official calibration and validation site for forestry products in Korea. Accordingly, the author designed a calibration and validation site for the forestry products following international standards. In addition, to install calibration and validation sites nationwide, the authors selected appropriate sensors and evaluated the applicability of the sensors. As a result, the difference between the ground observation data and the Sentinel-2 image was observed to be within ±5%, confirming that the sensor could be used for nationwide expansion.

• Ecology and Resilient Infrastructure
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.161-170
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• 2023

We attempted to estimate the carbon accumulation of Hibiscus hamabo and Paliurus ramosissimus, semimangroves native to Jeju Island, by remote sensing and to build an artificial intelligence model that predicts its spatial variation with climatic factors. The aboveground carbon accumulation of semi-mangroves was estimated from the aboveground biomass density (AGBD) provided by the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) lidar upscaled using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) extracted from Sentinel-2 images. In Jeju Island, carbon accumulation per unit area was 16.6 t C/ha for H. hamabo and 21.1 t C/ha for P. ramosissimus. Total carbon accumulation of semi-mangroves was estimated at 11.5 t C on the entire coast of Jeju Island. Random forest analysis was applied to predict carbon accumulation in semi-mangroves according to environmental factors. The deviation of aboveground biomass compared to the distribution area of semi-mangrove forests in Jeju Island was calculated to analyze spatial variation of biomass. The main environmental factors affecting this deviation were the precipitation of the wettest month, the maximum temperature of the warmest month, isothermality, and the mean temperature of the wettest quarter. The carbon accumulation of semi-mangroves predicted by random forest analysis in Jeju Island showed spatial variation in the range of 12.0 t C/ha - 27.6 t C/ha. The remote sensing estimation method and the artificial intelligence prediction method of carbon accumulation in this study can be used as basic data and techniques needed for the conservation and creation of mangroves as carbon sink on the Korean Peninsula.