A strategy for the verification of CAP declarations using Sentinel-2 images in Navarre

[ES] En junio de 2018, la Comisión Europea aprobó una modificación de la Política Agraria Común (PAC) que, entre otros aspectos, plantea el uso de imágenes del programa Copernicus para la verificar que las declaraciones presentadas por los agricultores son correctas. En los últimos años distintas iniciativas investigadoras han tratado de desarrollar herramientas operativas con este fin, entre estas se encuentra el proyecto Interreg-POCTEFA PyrenEOS. En este artículo se expone la estrategia metodológica propuesta en el proyecto PyrenEOS, que se basa en la identificación del cultivo más probable utilizando el algoritmo Random Forests. Como elemento diferenciador, se propone seleccionar la muestra de entrenamiento a partir de una selección de las declaraciones PAC según su NDVI. Además, se definen una serie de reglas para determinar el grado de incertidumbre en la clasificación y los criterios para categorizar cada recinto del mapa de verificación según un código de colores a modo de semáforo, en el que el verde indica recintos con declaración correcta, el rojo recintos con declaración dudosa y el naranja recintos con una incertidumbre alta en la clasificación. Esta estrategia de verificación se aplica a dos Comarcas Agrarias de Navarra, en una campaña agrícola para la que se contó con inspecciones de campo de aproximadamente el 7% de los recintos declarados. Los resultados de esta validación, con fiabilidades globales en la clasificación próximas al 80% cuando se considera el cultivo más probable predicho por el clasificador y al 90% cuando se consideran los dos cultivos más probables, ponen de manifiesto que es posible identificar los recintos correctamente declarados (recintos verdes) con una tasa de error inferior al 1%. Los recintos naranjas y rojos, que requerirán del análisis y juicio posterior de técnicos de inspección, suponen un porcentaje reducido de las declaraciones (~6% de los recintos) y concentran la mayoría de las declaraciones incorrectas.[EN] In June 2018, the European Commission approved a modification of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that, among other measures, proposed the use of Copernicus data for the verification process of farmers’ declarations. In recent years, several research efforts have been conducted to develop operational tools to accomplish this aim, among this the Interreg-POCTEFA PyrenEOS project. This article describes the methodological strategy proposed in the PyrenEOS project, which is based on the identification of the most probable crop using the Random Forests algorithm. Originally, the strategy builds a training sample from the CAP declarations file based on their NDVI time series. In addition, a series of rules are proposed to establish the level of uncertainty in the classification, and the criteria used to represent each parcel in the verification map with a simple colour coding (traffic light), where green represents correctly declared parcels, red indicates that the declaration is dubious, and orange corresponds to parcels with a high classification uncertainty. This verification strategy has been applied to two Agricultural Regions of Navarre, during an agricultural campaign where valuable field inspections were available, with a sampling intensity of 7% of the declared parcels. The results obtained, report overall accuracies close to 80% when the most probable crop was considered, and 90% when the two most probable crops were considered. This proves it is possible to identify correctly declared parcels (green parcels) with an error below 1%. Orange and red parcels should be considered for further analysis and inspection by technicians from the paying agencies, though they represent a small percentage of declarations (~6% of parcels), and include most of the wrong declarations.Este trabajo se ha financiado con el proyecto PyrenEOS EFA 048/15, cofinanciado al 65% por el Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) a través del programa Interreg V-A España-Francia-Andorra (POCTEFA 2014-2020). Los autores agradecen al Servicio del Organismo Pagador del Departamento de Desarrollo Rural y Medio Ambiente del Gobierno de Navarra la cesión de los ficheros vectoriales de declaraciones e inspecciones PAC utilizadas en el contexto de este trabajo.González-Audícana, M.; López, S.; Sola, I.; Álvarez-Mozos, J. (2020). Estrategia para la verificación de declaraciones PAC a partir de imágenes Sentinel-2 en Navarra. Revista de Teledetección. 0(56):69-88. https://doi.org/10.4995/raet.2020.14128OJS698805

Multitemporal evaluation of topographic correction methods using multispectral synthetic images

Revista oficial de la Asociación Española de Teledetección[EN] This paper presents a multitemporal evaluation of topographic correction (TOC) methods based on synthetically generated images in order to evaluate the influence of solar angles on the performance of TOC methods. These synthetic images represent the radiance an optical sensor would receive for different periods of the year considering the real topography (SR image), and considering the relief completely horizontal (SH image). The comparison between the corrected image obtained applying a TOC method to a SR image and the SH image of the same area, i.e. considered the ideal correction, allows assessing the performance of each TOC algorithm, quantitatively measured through the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM).[ES] En este trabajo se presentan los resultados de la evaluación multitemporal de varios métodos de corrección topográfica (TOC), cuya bondad se determina de forma cuantitativa mediante el uso de imágenes sintéticas multiespectrales simuladas para diferentes fechas de adquisición a lo largo del año. Para cada fecha se generan dos imágenes sintéticas, una considerando el relieve real (imagen SR), y otra el relieve horizontal (imagen SH). Las imágenes SR se corrigen utilizando distintos TOC y estas imágenes corregidas se comparan con la corrección ideal (imagen SH) mediante el índice de similitud estructural (SSIM). Los valores de SSIM nos permiten evaluar la eficacia de cada corrección para distintas fechas, es decir, para distintos ángulos de elevación solar.Sola, I.; González-Audícana, M.; Álvarez-Mozos, J.; Torres, J. (2014). Evaluación multitemporal de métodos de corrección topográfica mediante el uso de imágenes sintéticas multiespectrales. Revista de Teledetección. (41):71-78. doi:10.4995/raet.2014.2246.SWORD717841Baraldi, A., Gironda, M., & Simonetti, D. (2010). Operational Two-Stage Stratified Topographic Correction of Spaceborne Multispectral Imagery Employing an Automatic Spectral-Rule-Based Decision-Tree Preliminary Classifier. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 48(1), 112-146. doi:10.1109/tgrs.2009.2028017Civco, D.L. 1989. Topographic Normalization of Landsat Thematic Mapper Digital Imagery. Photogramm. Eng. Remote S., 55: 1303-1309.Dumortier, D. 1998. The satellight model of turbidity variations in Europe. Report for the 6th Satel-Light meeting. Freiburg, Germany.Law, K.H., Nichol, J. 2004. Topographic correction for differential illumination effects on IKONOS satellite imagery. Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spat. Inform. Sci., pp. 641-646.Page, J. 1996. Algorithms for the Satellight programme. Technical Report for the 2nd SATEL-LIGHT meeting. June, 1996, Bergen, Norway.Smith, J.A., Lin, T.L., Ranson, K.J. 1980. The Lambertian Assumption and Landsat Data. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, 46(9): 1183-1189Teillet, P. M., Guindon, B., & Goodenough, D. G. (1982). On the Slope-Aspect Correction of Multispectral Scanner Data. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, 8(2), 84-106. doi:10.1080/07038992.1982.10855028Twele, A., Kappas, M., Lauer, J., Erasmi, S. 2006. The effect of stratified topographic correction on land cover classificacion in tropical mountainous regions ISPRS Comm. VII Symp., 8-11 May, Enschede, The Netherlands, pp. 432-437

Visual 3-D SLAM from UAVs

The aim of the paper is to present, test and discuss the implementation of Visual SLAM techniques to images taken from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) outdoors, in partially structured environments. Every issue of the whole process is discussed in order to obtain more accurate localization and mapping from UAVs flights. Firstly, the issues related to the visual features of objects in the scene, their distance to the UAV, and the related image acquisition system and their calibration are evaluated for improving the whole process. Other important, considered issues are related to the image processing techniques, such as interest point detection, the matching procedure and the scaling factor. The whole system has been tested using the COLIBRI mini UAV in partially structured environments. The results that have been obtained for localization, tested against the GPS information of the flights, show that Visual SLAM delivers reliable localization and mapping that makes it suitable for some outdoors applications when flying UAVs

Cluster-based density-functional approach to quantum transport through molecular and atomic contacts

We present a cluster-based density-functional approach to model charge transport through molecular and atomic contacts. The electronic structure of the contacts is determined in the framework of density functional theory, and the parameters needed to describe transport are extracted from finite clusters. A similar procedure, restricted to nearest-neighbor interactions in the electrodes, has been presented by Damle et al. [Chem. Phys. 281, 171 (2002)]. Here, we show how to systematically improve the description of the electrodes by extracting bulk parameters from sufficiently large metal clusters. In this way we avoid problems arising from the use of nonorthogonal basis functions. For demonstration we apply our method to electron transport through Au contacts with various atomic-chain configurations and to a single-atom contact of Al.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figure

Dynamic Bayesian network for semantic place classification in mobile robotics

In this paper, the problem of semantic place categorization in mobile robotics is addressed by considering a time-based probabilistic approach called dynamic Bayesian mixture model (DBMM), which is an improved variation of the dynamic Bayesian network. More specifically, multi-class semantic classification is performed by a DBMM composed of a mixture of heterogeneous base classifiers, using geometrical features computed from 2D laserscanner data, where the sensor is mounted on-board a moving robot operating indoors. Besides its capability to combine different probabilistic classifiers, the DBMM approach also incorporates time-based (dynamic) inferences in the form of previous class-conditional probabilities and priors. Extensive experiments were carried out on publicly available benchmark datasets, highlighting the influence of the number of time-slices and the effect of additive smoothing on the classification performance of the proposed approach. Reported results, under different scenarios and conditions, show the effectiveness and competitive performance of the DBMM

Sensory deprivation in Staphylococcus aureus

Bacteria use two-component systems (TCSs) to sense and respond to environmental changes. The core genome of the major human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus encodes 16 TCSs, one of which (WalRK) is essential. Here we show that S. aureus can be deprived of its complete sensorial TCS network and still survive under growth arrest conditions similarly to wild-type bacteria. Under replicating conditions, however, the WalRK system is necessary and sufficient to maintain bacterial growth, indicating that sensing through TCSs is mostly dispensable for living under constant environmental conditions. Characterization of S. aureus derivatives containing individual TCSs reveals that each TCS appears to be autonomous and self-sufficient to sense and respond to specific environmental cues, although some level of cross-regulation between non-cognate sensor-response regulator pairs occurs in vivo. This organization, if confirmed in other bacterial species, may provide a general evolutionarily mechanism for flexible bacterial adaptation to life in new niches

MicroRNAs expression, chromosomal alterations and immunoglobulin variable Heavy chain hypermutations in Mantle Cell Lymphomas

The contribution of microRNAs (miR) to the pathogenesis of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is not well known.We investigated the expression of 86 mature miRs mapped to frequently altered genomic regions in MCL in CD5+/CD5 normal B cells, reactive lymph nodes, and purified tumor cells of 17 leukemic MCL, 12 nodal MCL, and 8MCL cell lines. Genomic alterations of the tumors were studied by single nucleotide polymorphism arrays and comparative genomic hybridization. Leukemic and nodal tumors showed a high number of differentially expressed miRs compared with purified normal B cells, but only some of them were commonly deregulated in both tumor types. An unsupervised analysis of miR expression profile in purified leukemic MCL cells revealed two clusters of tumors characterized by different mutational status of the immunoglobulin genes, proliferation signature, and number of genomic alterations. The expression of most miRs was not related to copy number changes in their respective chromosomal loci. Only the levels of miRs included in the miR-17-92 cluster were significantly related to genetic alterations at 13q31. Moreover, overexpression of miR-17-5p/miR-20a from this cluster was associated with high MYC mRNA levels in tumors with a more aggressive behavior. In conclusion, the miR expression pattern of MCL is deregulated in comparison with normal lymphoid cells and distinguishes two subgroups of tumors with different biological features.Postprint (updated version

Resonant Andreev reflections in superconductor-carbon-nanotube devices

Resonant Andreev reflection through superconductor-carbon-nanotube devices was investigated theoretically with a focus on the superconducting proximity effect. Consistent with a recent experiment, we find that for high transparency devices on-resonance, the Andreev current is characterized by a large value and a resistance dip; low-transparency off-resonance devices give the opposite result. We also give evidence that the observed low-temperature transport anomaly may be a natural result of Andreev reflection process