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Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA)

A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 March 2019)

Special Issue Editor

Department of Applied Earth Sciences, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, P.O. Box 6, Hengelosestraat 99, 7500 AA Enschede, The Netherlands
Interests: disaster risk management; damage assessment; vulnerability; UAV; resilience; recovery; OBIA; object-oriented analysis; VGI
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

During the last decade, Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA)has grown from a niche discipline to a recognized and vibrant branch of geoinformation science, and methods developed by the growing community have helped to tackle problems in virtually all domains where geographic data are used. The growing importance of image processing, be it of traditional airborne or satellite data, or complex hyperspectral data stacks, videos, or image data used by other communities, has resulted in a multitude of methodological approaches. Object-based approaches have turned out to be an excellent way to incorporate process and feature knowledge, in addition to providing an effective way of dealing with multi-scale data. Remote Sensing has already published three Special Issues on the theme of GEOBIA, the most recent one publishing the most interesting outcomes of the GEOBIA 2016 conference that took place in 2016 at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. The 2016 conference focused on specific two issues: (i) solutions, and (ii) synergies. The theme highlighted both the need for more operational OBIA methodologies that can help solve current societal problems, and the potential gains of merging traditional OBIA with developments in related domains, such as photogrammetry, computer vision and machine learning.

The Special Issue for the GEOBIA 2016 conference already comprises 12 excellent papers. Given the continued relevance of the topic, we invite further submissions for an ongoing topical GEOBIA collection.

Authors are required to check and follow the specific Instructions to Authors, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/instructions.

Prof. Dr. Norman Kerle
Collection Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Operationalization of OBIA solutions
  • Transferability of solutions to other datasets, datatypes and data of different quality
  • Automatic determination of segmentation and classification parameters and thresholds
  • Objective success scoring of OBIA solutions (e.g., via the Benchmarking exercise)
  • Open source solutions
  • Big data
  • Machine learning methods in OBIA
  • Segmentation-based point-cloud analysis
  • Processing of UAV data (very high resolution, oblique)
  • Developments in GIS-based OBIA

Related Special Issues

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

27 pages, 2783 KiB  
Article
Large-Area, High Spatial Resolution Land Cover Mapping Using Random Forests, GEOBIA, and NAIP Orthophotography: Findings and Recommendations
by Aaron E. Maxwell, Michael P. Strager, Timothy A. Warner, Christopher A. Ramezan, Alice N. Morgan and Cameron E. Pauley
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(12), 1409; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11121409 - 13 Jun 2019
Cited by 51 | Viewed by 7302
Abstract
Despite the need for quality land cover information, large-area, high spatial resolution land cover mapping has proven to be a difficult task for a variety of reasons including large data volumes, complexity of developing training and validation datasets, data availability, and heterogeneity in [...] Read more.
Despite the need for quality land cover information, large-area, high spatial resolution land cover mapping has proven to be a difficult task for a variety of reasons including large data volumes, complexity of developing training and validation datasets, data availability, and heterogeneity in data and landscape conditions. We investigate the use of geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA), random forest (RF) machine learning, and National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) orthophotography for mapping general land cover across the entire state of West Virginia, USA, an area of roughly 62,000 km2. We obtained an overall accuracy of 96.7% and a Kappa statistic of 0.886 using a combination of NAIP orthophotography and ancillary data. Despite the high overall classification accuracy, some classes were difficult to differentiate, as highlight by the low user’s and producer’s accuracies for the barren, impervious, and mixed developed classes. In contrast, forest, low vegetation, and water were generally mapped with accuracy. The inclusion of ancillary data and first- and second-order textural measures generally improved classification accuracy whereas band indices and object geometric measures were less valuable. Including super-object attributes improved the classification slightly; however, this increased the computational time and complexity. From the findings of this research and previous studies, recommendations are provided for mapping large spatial extents. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA))
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21 pages, 3996 KiB  
Article
Spatiotemporal Mapping and Monitoring of Whiting in the Semi-Enclosed Gulf Using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Time Series Images and a Generic Ensemble Tree-Based Model
by Abdallah Shanableh, Rami Al-Ruzouq, Mohamed Barakat A. Gibril, Cristina Flesia and Saeed AL-Mansoori
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(10), 1193; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11101193 - 20 May 2019
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3116
Abstract
Whiting events in seas and lakes are a natural phenomenon caused by suspended calcium carbonate (CaCO3) particles. The Arabian Gulf, which is a semi-enclosed sea, is prone to extensive whiting that covers tens of thousands of square kilometres. Despite the extent [...] Read more.
Whiting events in seas and lakes are a natural phenomenon caused by suspended calcium carbonate (CaCO3) particles. The Arabian Gulf, which is a semi-enclosed sea, is prone to extensive whiting that covers tens of thousands of square kilometres. Despite the extent and frequency of whiting events in the Gulf, studies documenting the whiting phenomenon are lacking. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to detect, map and document the spatial and temporal distributions of whiting events in the Gulf using daily images acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites from 2002 to 2018. A method integrating a geographic object-based image analysis, the correlation-based feature selection technique (CFS), the adaptive boosting decision tree (AdaBoost DT) and the rule-based classification were used in the study to detect, quantify and assess whiting events in the Gulf from the MODIS data. Firstly, a multiresolution segmentation was optimised using unsupervised quality measures. Secondly, a set of spectral bands and indices were investigated using the CFS to select the most relevant feature(s). Thirdly, a generic AdaBoost DT model and a rule-based classification were adopted to classify the MODIS time series data. Finally, the developed classification model was compared with various tree-based classifiers such as random forest, a single DT and gradient boosted DT. Results showed that both the combination of the mean of the green spectral band and the normalised difference index between the green and blue bands (NDGB), or the combination of the NDGB and the colour index for estimating the concentrations of calcium carbonates (CI) of the image objects, were the most significant features for detecting whiting. Moreover, the generic AdaBoost DT classification model outperformed the other tested tree-based classifiers with an overall accuracy of 97.86% and a kappa coefficient of 0.97. The whiting events during the study period (2002–2018) occurred exclusively during the winter season (November to March) and mostly in February. Geographically, the whiting events covered areas ranging from 12,000 km2 to 60,000 km2 and were mainly located along the southwest coast of the Gulf. The duration of most whiting events was 2 to 6 days, with some events extending as long as 8 to 11 days. The study documented the spatiotemporal distribution of whiting events in the Gulf from 2002 to 2018 and presented an effective tool for detecting and motoring whiting events. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA))
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29 pages, 45881 KiB  
Article
Identifying Generalizable Image Segmentation Parameters for Urban Land Cover Mapping through Meta-Analysis and Regression Tree Modeling
by Brian A. Johnson and Shahab E. Jozdani
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(1), 73; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10010073 - 06 Jan 2018
Cited by 23 | Viewed by 6235
Abstract
The advent of very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery and the development of Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) have led to many new opportunities for fine-scale land cover mapping, especially in urban areas. Image segmentation is an important step in the GEOBIA framework, [...] Read more.
The advent of very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery and the development of Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) have led to many new opportunities for fine-scale land cover mapping, especially in urban areas. Image segmentation is an important step in the GEOBIA framework, so great time/effort is often spent to ensure that computer-generated image segments closely match real-world objects of interest. In the remote sensing community, segmentation is frequently performed using the multiresolution segmentation (MRS) algorithm, which is tuned through three user-defined parameters (the scale, shape/color, and compactness/smoothness parameters). The scale parameter (SP) is the most important parameter and governs the average size of generated image segments. Existing automatic methods to determine suitable SPs for segmentation are scene-specific and often computationally intensive, so an approach to estimating appropriate SPs that is generalizable (i.e., not scene-specific) could speed up the GEOBIA workflow considerably. In this study, we attempted to identify generalizable SPs for five common urban land cover types (buildings, vegetation, roads, bare soil, and water) through meta-analysis and nonlinear regression tree (RT) modeling. First, we performed a literature search of recent studies that employed GEOBIA for urban land cover mapping and extracted the MRS parameters used, the image properties (i.e., spatial and radiometric resolutions), and the land cover classes mapped. Using this data extracted from the literature, we constructed RT models for each land cover class to predict suitable SP values based on the: image spatial resolution, image radiometric resolution, shape/color parameter, and compactness/smoothness parameter. Based on a visual and quantitative analysis of results, we found that for all land cover classes except water, relatively accurate SPs could be identified using our RT modeling results. The main advantage of our approach over existing SP selection approaches is that our RT model results are not scene-specific, so they can be used to quickly identify suitable SPs in other VHR images. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA))
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