Specification test for panel data models with interactive fixed effects

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Mapping Soil Salinity/Sodicity by using Landsat OLI Imagery and PLSR Algorithm over Semiarid West Jilin Province, China

Soil salinity and sodicity can significantly reduce the value and the productivity of affected lands, posing degradation, and threats to sustainable development of natural resources on earth. This research attempted to map soil salinity/sodicity via disentangling the relationships between Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) imagery and in-situ measurements (EC, pH) over the west Jilin of China. We established the retrieval models for soil salinity and sodicity using Partial Least Square Regression (PLSR). Spatial distribution of the soils that were subjected to hybridized salinity and sodicity (HSS) was obtained by overlay analysis using maps of soil salinity and sodicity in geographical information system (GIS) environment. We analyzed the severity and occurring sizes of soil salinity, sodicity, and HSS with regard to specified soil types and land cover. Results indicated that the models’ accuracy was improved by combining the reflectance bands and spectral indices that were mathematically transformed. Therefore, our results stipulated that the OLI imagery and PLSR method applied to mapping soil salinity and sodicity in the region. The mapping results revealed that the areas of soil salinity, sodicity, and HSS were 1.61 × 106 hm2, 1.46 × 106 hm2, and 1.36 × 106 hm2, respectively. Also, the occurring area of moderate and intensive sodicity was larger than that of salinity. This research may underpin efficiently mapping regional salinity/sodicity occurrences, understanding the linkages between spectral reflectance and ground measurements of soil salinity and sodicity, and provide tools for soil salinity monitoring and the sustainable utilization of land resources

Detection method based on improved faster R-CNN for pin defect in transmission lines

Defects such as insulator, pins, and counterweight in highvoltage transmission lines affect the stability of the power system. The small targets such as pins in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) inspection images of transmission lines occupy a small proportion in the images and the characteristic representations are poor which results a low defect detection rate and a high false positive rate. This paper proposed a transmission line pin defect detection algorithm based on improved Faster R-CNN. First, the pre-training weights with higher matching degree are obtained based on transfer learning. And it is applied to construct defect detection model. Then, the regional proposal network is used to extract features in the model. The results of defect detection are obtained by regression calculation and classification of regional characteristics. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the pin defect detection of the transmission line reaches 81.25