Gradients in urban material composition: A new concept to map cities with spaceborne imaging spectroscopy data

To understand processes in urban environments, such as urban energy fluxes or surface temperature patterns, it is important to map urban surface materials. Airborne imaging spectroscopy data have been successfully used to identify urban surface materials mainly based on unmixing algorithms. Upcoming spaceborne Imaging Spectrometers (IS), such as the Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP), will reduce the time and cost-critical limitations of airborne systems for Earth Observation (EO). However, the spatial resolution of all operated and planned IS in space will not be higher than 20 to 30 m and, thus, the detection of pure Endmember (EM) candidates in urban areas, a requirement for spectral unmixing, is very limited. Gradient analysis could be an alternative method for retrieving urban surface material compositions in pixels from spaceborne IS. The gradient concept is well known in ecology to identify plant species assemblages formed by similar environmental conditions but has never been tested for urban materials. However, urban areas also contain neighbourhoods with similar physical, compositional and structural characteristics. Based on this assumption, this study investigated (1) whether cover fractions of surface materials change gradually in urban areas and (2) whether these gradients can be adequately mapped and interpreted using imaging spectroscopy data (e.g. EnMAP) with 30 m spatial resolution. Similarities of material compositions were analysed on the basis of 153 systematically distributed samples on a detailed surface material map using Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA). Determined gradient scores for the first two gradients were regressed against the corresponding mean reflectance of simulated EnMAP spectra using Partial Least Square regression models. Results show strong correlations with R2 = 0.85 and R2 = 0.71 and an RMSE of 0.24 and 0.21 for the first and second axis, respectively. The subsequent mapping of the first gradient reveals patterns that correspond to the transition from predominantly vegetation classes to the dominance of artificial materials. Patterns resulting from the second gradient are associated with surface material compositions that are related to finer structural differences in urban structures. The composite gradient map shows patterns of common surface material compositions that can be related to urban land use classes such as Urban Structure Types (UST). By linking the knowledge of typical material compositions with urban structures, gradient analysis seems to be a powerful tool to map characteristic material compositions in 30 m imaging spectroscopy data of urban areas

a Berlin case study

Durch den Prozess der Urbanisierung verändert die Menschheit die Erdoberfläche in großem Ausmaß und auf unwiederbringliche Weise. Die optische Fernerkundung ist eine Art der Erdbeobachtung, die das Verständnis dieses dynamischen Prozesses und seiner Auswirkungen erweitern kann. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht, inwiefern hyperspektrale Daten Informationen über Versiegelung liefern können, die der integrierten Analyse urbaner Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehungen dienen. Hierzu wird die Verarbeitungskette von Vorverarbeitung der Rohdaten bis zur Erstellung referenzierter Karten zu Landbedeckung und Versiegelung am Beispiel von Hyperspectral Mapper Daten von Berlin ganzheitlich untersucht. Die traditionelle Verarbeitungskette wird mehrmals erweitert bzw. abgewandelt. So wird die radiometrische Vorverarbeitung um die Normalisierung von Helligkeitsgradienten erweitert, welche durch die direktionellen Reflexionseigenschaften urbaner Oberflächen entstehen. Die Klassifikation in fünf spektral komplexe Landnutzungsklassen wird mit Support Vector Maschinen ohne zusätzliche Merkmalsextraktion oder Differenzierung von Subklassen durchgeführt...thesi

special section guest editorial airborne hyperspectral remote sensing of urban environments

University of Pavia, Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, ItalyRemote sensing is a very useful tool in retrieving urban information in a timely, detailed, andcost-effective manner to assist various planning and management activities. Hyperspectralremote sensing has been of great interest to the scientific community since its emergence inthe 1980s, due to its very high spectral resolution providing the potential of finer material detec-tion, classification, identification, and quantification, compared to the traditional multispectralremote sensing. With the advance of computing facilities and more airborne high-spatial-reso-lution hyperspectral image data becoming available, many investigations on its real applicationsare taking place. In particular, urban environments are characterized by heterogeneous surfacecovers with significant spatial and spectral variations, and airborne hyperspectral imagery withhigh spatial and spectral resolutions offers an effective tool to analyze complex urban scenes.The objectiveof this special section of the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing is to provide asnapshot of status, potentials, and challenges of high-spatial-resolution hyperspectral imagery inurban feature extraction and land use interpretation in support of urban monitoring and man-agement decisions. This section includes twelve papers that cover four major topics: urban landuse and land cover classification, impervious surface mapping, built-up land analysis, and urbansurface water mapping.There are nine papers about urban land use and land cover classification. "Hyperspectralimage classification with improved local-region filters" by Ran et al. proposes two local-regionfilters, i.e., spatial adaptive weighted filter and collaborative-representation-based filter, for spa-tial feature extraction, thereby improving classification of urban hyperspectral imagery. "Edge-constrained Markov random field classification by integrating hyperspectral image with LiDARdata over urban areas" by Ni et al. adopts an edge-constrained Markov random field method foraccurate land cover classification over urban areas with hyperspectral image and LiDAR data."Combining data mining algorithm and object-based image analysis for detailed urban mappingof hyperspectral images" by Hamedianfar et al. explores the combined performance of a datamining algorithm and object-based image analysis, which can produce high accuracy of urbansurfacemapping."Dynamicclassifierselectionusingspectral-spatial information forhyperspec-tralimageclassification"bySuetal.proposestheintegrationofspectralfeatureswithvolumetrictextural features to improve the classification performance for urban hyperspectral images."Representation-based classifications with Markov random field model for hyperspectralurban data" by Xiong et al. improves representation-based classification by considering spa-tial-contextualinformationderivedfromaMarkovrandomfield."Classificationofhyperspectralurban data using adaptivesimultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit" by Zou et al. improves theclassification performance of a joint sparsity model, i.e., simultaneous orthogonal matching pur-suit, by using a priori segmentation map.Othertechniques,suchaslinearunmixinganddimensionalityreduction,arealsoinvestigatedin conjunction with urban surface mapping.Among the nine papersonclassification,twopapersconsider linear unmixing, which are "Unsupervised classification strategy utilizing an endmem-ber extraction technique for airborne hyperspectral remotely sensed imagery" by Xu et al., and"Endmembernumberestimationforhyperspectralimagerybasedonvertexcomponentanalysis"by Liu et al. One paper studies the impact of dimensionality reduction (through band selection)on classification accuracy, which is "Ant colony optimization-based supervised and unsuper-vised band selections for hyperspectral urban data classification" by Gao et al

Per-Pixel Versus Object-Based Classification of Urban Land Cover Extraction Using High Spatial Resolution Imagery

In using traditional digital classification algorithms, a researcher typically encounters serious issues in identifying urban land cover classes employing high resolution data. A normal approach is to use spectral information alone and ignore spatial information and a group of pixels that need to be considered together as an object. We used QuickBird image data over a central region in the city of Phoenix, Arizona to examine if an object-based classifier can accurately identify urban classes. To demonstrate if spectral information alone is practical in urban classification, we used spectra of the selected classes from randomly selected points to examine if they can be effectively discriminated. The overall accuracy based on spectral information alone reached only about 63.33%. We employed five different classification procedures with the object-based paradigm that separates spatially and spectrally similar pixels at different scales. The classifiers to assign land covers to segmented objects used in the study include membership functions and the nearest neighbor classifier. The object-based classifier achieved a high overall accuracy (90.40%), whereas the most commonly used decision rule, namely maximum likelihood classifier, produced a lower overall accuracy (67.60%). This study demonstrates that the object-based classifier is a significantly better approach than the classical per- pixel classifiers. Further, this study reviews application of different parameters for segmentation and classification, combined use of composite and original bands, selection of different scale levels, and choice of classifiers. Strengths and weaknesses of the object-based prototype are presented and we provide suggestions to avoid or minimize uncertainties and limitations associated with the approach.

Large-Scale Urban Impervous Surfaces Estimation Through Incorporating Temporal and Spatial Information into Spectral Mixture Analysis

With rapid urbanization, impervious surfaces, a major component of urbanized areas, have increased concurrently. As a key indicator of environmental quality and urbanization intensity, an accurate estimation of impervious surfaces becomes essential. Numerous automated estimation approaches have been developed during the past decades. Among them, spectral mixture analysis (SMA) has been recognized as a powerful and widely employed technique. While SMA has proven valuable in impervious surface estimation, effects of temporal and spectral variability have not been successfully addressed. In particular, impervious surface estimation is likely to be sensitive to seasonal changes, majorly due to the shadowing effects of vegetation canopy in summer and the confusion between impervious surfaces and soil in winter. Moreover, endmember variability and multi-collinearity have adversely impacted the accurate estimation of impervious surface distribution with coarse resolution remote sensing imagery. Therefore, the main goal of this research is to incorporate temporal and spatial information, as well as geostatistical approaches, into SMA for improving large-scale urban impervious surface estimation. Specifically, three new approaches have been developed in this dissertation to improve the accuracy of large-scale impervious surface estimation. First, a phenology based temporal mixture analysis was developed to address seasonal sensitivity and spectral confusion issues with the multi-temporal MODIS NDVI data. Second, land use land cover information assisted temporal mixture analysis was proposed to handle the issue of endmember class variability through analyzing the spatial relationship between endmembers and surrounding environmental and socio-economic factors in support of the selection of an appropriate number and types of endmember classes. Third, a geostatistical temporal mixture analysis was developed to address endmember spectral variability by generating per-pixel spatial varied endmember spectra. Analysis results suggest that, first, with the proposed phenology based temporal mixture analysis, a significant phenophase differences between impervious surfaces and soil can be extracted and employed in unmxing analysis, which can facilitate their discrimination and successfully address the issue of seasonal sensitivity and spectral confusion. Second, with the analyzed spatial distribution relationship between endmembers and environmental and socio-economic factors, endmember classes can be identified with clear physical meanings throughout the whole study area, which can effectively improve the unmixing analysis results. Third, the use of the spatially varying per-pixel endmember generated from the geostatistical approach can effectively consider the endmember spectra spatial variability, overcome the endmember within-class variability issue, and improve the accuracy of impervious surface estimates. Major contributions of this research can be summarized as follows. First, instead of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images, MODIS imageries with large geographic coverage and high temporal resolution have been successfully employed in this research, thus making timely and regional estimation of impervious surfaces possible. Second, this research proves that the incorporation of geographic knowledge (e.g. phonological knowledge, spatial interaction, and geostatistics) can effectively improve the spectral mixture analysis model, and therefore improve the estimation accuracy of urban impervious surfaces

Uncertainty Assessment of Spectral Mixture Analysis in Remote Sensing Imagery

Spectral mixture analysis (SMA), a scheme of sub-pixel-based classifications, is one of the widely used models to map fractional land use and land cover information in remote sensing imagery. It assumes that: 1) a mixed pixel is composed by several pure land cover classes (endmembers) linearly or nonlinearly, and 2) the spectral signature of each endmember is a constant within the entire spatial extent of analysis. SMA has been commonly applied to impervious surface area extraction, vegetation fraction estimation, and land use and land cover change (LULC) mapping. Limitations of SMA, however, still exist. First, the existence of between- and within-class variability prevents the selection of accurate endmembers, which results in poor accuracy of fractional land cover estimates. Weighted spectral mixture analysis (WSMA) and transformed spectral mixture analysis (TSMA) are alternate means to address the within- and between- class variability. These methods, however, have not been analyzed systematically and comprehensively. The effectiveness of each WSMA and TSMA scheme is still unknown, in particular within different urban areas. Second, multiple endmember SMA (MESMA) is a better alternative to address spectral mixture model uncertainties. It, nonetheless, is time consuming and inefficient. Further, incorrect endmember selections may still limit model performance as the best-fit endmember model might not be the optimal model due to the existence of spectral variability. Therefore, this study aims 1) to explore endmember uncertainties by examining WSMA and TSMA modeling comprehensively, and 2) to develop an improved MESMA model in order to address the uncertainties of spectral mixture models. Results of the WSMA examination illustrated that some weighting schemes did reduce endmember uncertainties since they could improve the fractional estimates significantly. The results also indicated that spectral class variance played a key role in addressing the endmember uncertainties, as the better performing weighting schemes were constructed with spectral class variance. In addition, the results of TSMA examination demonstrated that some TSMAs, such as normalized spectral mixture analysis (NSMA), could effectively solve the endmember uncertainties because of their stable performance in different study areas. Results of Class-based MEMSA (C-MESMA) indicated that it could address spectral mixture model uncertainties by reducing a lot of the calculation burden and effectively improving accuracy. Assessment demonstrated that C-MEMSA significantly improving accuracy. Major contributions of this study can be summarized as follow. First, the effectiveness of addressing endmember uncertainties have been fully discussed by examining: 1) the effectiveness of ten weighted spectral mixture models in urban environments; and 2) the effectiveness of 26 transformed spectral mixture models in three locations. Constructive guidance regarding handling endmember uncertainties using WSMA and TSMA have been provided. Second, the uncertainties of spectral mixture model were reduced by developing an improved MESMA model, named C-MESMA. C-MESMA could restrict the distribution of endmembers and reduce the calculation burden of traditional MESMA, increasing SMA accuracy significantly

Advances in remote sensing applications for urban sustainability

Abstract: It is essential to monitor urban evolution at spatial and temporal scales to improve our understanding of the changes in cities and their impact on natural resources and environmental systems. Various aspects of remote sensing are routinely used to detect and map features and changes on land and sea surfaces, and in the atmosphere that affect urban sustainability. We provide a critical and comprehensive review of the characteristics of remote sensing systems, and in particular the trade-offs between various system parameters, as well as their use in two key research areas: (a) issues resulting from the expansion of urban environments, and (b) sustainable urban development. The analysis identifies three key trends in the existing literature: (a) the integration of heterogeneous remote sensing data, primarily for investigating or modelling urban environments as a complex system, (b) the development of new algorithms for effective extraction of urban features, and (c) the improvement in the accuracy of traditional spectral-based classification algorithms for addressing the spectral heterogeneity within urban areas. Growing interests in renewable energy have also resulted in the increased use of remote sensing—for planning, operation, and maintenance of energy infrastructures, in particular the ones with spatial variability, such as solar, wind, and geothermal energy. The proliferation of sustainability thinking in all facets of urban development and management also acts as a catalyst for the increased use of, and advances in, remote sensing for urban applications