Recognition and classification of patterned ground polygons from remote sensing data Abstract The main objective of this thesis has been to prove the possibility of using object based image analysis classification for identification of the ice-wedge polygons and to find general method for their classification. The thesis contains a comparison of the object based and pixel based classification of the subject. The three classification rulesets for OBIA were developed on three test sites on Mars captured by HiRISE sensor. As a result, the general classification approach is suggested. The manually collected datasets, which are common in geomorphological research, were used as the reference sample. The OBIA classification provided better results in all three cases, whereas the pixel classification was valid in only one case. Another objective has been the automatization of the process of gaining information about morphometric characteristics of the ice-wedge polygons and the subsequent classification of the polygons. Within the scope of the process were developed methods for creating polygonal network and specified parameters of those methods. Several toolboxes for the ArcGIS software were prepared and they are part of the results of the thesis. Keywords: patterned ground, ice-wedge polygons, remote sensing,...

Terrain as a continuum can be categorized into landform units that exhibit common physiological and morphological characteristics which might serve as a boundary condition for a wide range of application domains. However, heterogeneous views, definitions and applications on landforms yield inconsistent and incompatible nomenclature that lack interoperability. Yet, there is still room for developing methods for establishing a formal background for general type of classification models to provide different disciplines with a basis of landscape description that is also commonsense to human insight. This study proposes a method of landform classification that reveals general geomorphometry of the landscape. Landform classes that are commonsense to human insight and relevant to various disciplines is adopted to generate landforms at the landscape scale. Proposed method integrates local geometry of the surface with geomorphometric context. A set of DTMs at relevant scale are utilized where local geometry is represented with morphometric DTMs, and geomorphometric context is incorporated through relative terrain position and terrain network. &ldquo / Object-based image analysis (OBIA)&rdquo / tools that have the ability to segment DTMs into more representative terrain objects and connect those objects in a multi-level hierarchy is adopted. A fuzzy classification approach is utilized via semantic descriptions to represent ambiguities both in attribute and geographical space. Method is applied at different case areas to evaluate the efficiency and stability of the classification. Outcomes portray reasonable amount of consistency where the results can be utilized as general or multi-purpose regarding some ambiguity that is inherent in landforms as well.

Orientador: Maria de Lourdes Bueno Trindade Galo / Banca: Alzir Felippe Buffara Antunes / Banca: Amilton Amorim / Resumo: A circulação de veículos na cidade de Bogotá, capital da Colômbia, é muito alta, principalmente por este ser o centro de convergência do sistema de transportes, além de ser o pólo comercial, cultural e industrial do país. Com o crescimento urbano e econômico da cidade, o número de veículos que trafega nela vem aumentando, ano após ano, principalmente na região metropolitana. Em decorrência desse aumento, está sendo observada a deterioração, cada vez maior, das vias urbanas da cidade, tornando necessário buscar alternativas que possam mitigar este problema. Neste contexto, a proposta central desta pesquisa é classificar os tipos de pavimentos das vias urbanas, de Bogotá, fazendo uso de ortoimagens fornecidas pelo Instituto Geográfico "Agustín Codazzi" da Colômbia, adquiridas com uma câmara Vexcel Ultracam-D ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The flow of vehicles in Bogotá, capital city of Colombia, is really intense, mainly for the city being the converging center of the transportation system, furthermore, being the countries' commercial, cultural and industrial pole. Because of the urban and economic growth, the number of vehicles which are driven in that city have been increasing year after year, mainly in the metropolitan area. Due to this increase, it has been observed, each time more, the deterioration of urban ways, becoming necessary to look for alternatives which can reduce this problem. Within this context the main proposal of this research is to classify the types of pavements of Bogota's urban ways. It'll make use of orthoimages provided by the Geographical Institute "Agustín Codazzi" from Colombia. These picture were taken with a spacial resolution camera named Vexcel Ultracam-D ... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

This master thesis deals with a classification technique for an automatic detection of different land cover types from combination of high resolution imagery and LiDAR data sets. The main aim is to introduce additional post-processing method to commonly accessible quality data sets which can replace traditional mapping techniques for certain type of applications. Classification is the process of dividing the image into land cover categories which helps with continuous and up-to-date monitoring management. Nowadays, with all the technologies and software available, it is possible to replace traditional monitoring methods with more automated processes to generate accurate and cost-effective results. This project uses object-oriented image analysis (OBIA) to classify available data sets into five main land cover classes. The automate classification rule set providing overall accuracy of 88% of correctly classified land cover types was developed and evaluated in this research. Further, the transferability of developed approach was tested upon the same type of data sets within different study area with similar success – overall accuracy was 87%. Also the limitations found during the investigation procedure are discussed and brief further approach in this field is outlined.

Today more and more people are moving to the cities around the world. This puts a lot of strain on the infrastructure as the cities grow in both width and height. To be able to monitor the ongoing change remote sensing is an effective tool and ways to make it even more effective, better and easier to use are constantly sought after. One way to monitor change detection is object based change detection. The idea has been around since the seventies, but it wasn’t until the early 2000 when it was introduced by Blaschke and Strobl(2001) to the market as a solution to the issues with pixel based analysis that it became popular with remote analysts around the world. KTH-SEG is developed at KTH Geoinformatics. It is developed to segment images in order to preform object based analysis; it can also be used for classification. In this thesis object based change detection over an area of Shanghai is carried out. Two different approaches are used; post-classification analysis as well as creating change detection images. The maps are assessed using the maximum likelihood report in the software Geomatica. The segmentation and classification is done using KTH-SEG, training areas and ground truth data polygons are drawn in ArcGIS and pre-processing and other operations is carried out using Geomatica. KTH-SEG offers a number of changeable settings that allows the segmentation to suit the image at hand.  It is easy to use and produces well defined classification maps that are usable for change detection The results are evaluated in order to estimate the efficiency of object based change detection in urban area and KTH-SEG is appraised as a segmentation and classification tool. The results show that the post-classification approach is superior to the change detection images. Whether the poor result of the change detection images is affected by other parameters than the object based approach can’t be determined. / Idag flyttar fler och fler människor in i städer runt om i världen. Det utgör en stor påverkan på den befintliga infra-strukturen då städerna växer på både höjden och bredden. För att kunna bevaka den förändring som sker så används ofta fjärranalys som ett effektivt verktyg. Sätt att utveckla befintliga tekniken försöker man hela tiden hitta nya, enklare och mer effektiva sätt att bevaka förändring finns alltid på horisonten. Objektbaserad förändrings analys är ett sätt att bevaka förändringar. Iden om att använda objekt baserad analys har funnits sedan 70-talet, men det var först i början av 2000-talet, då Blaschke och Strobl(2001) introducerade tekniken som en lösning på de problem man stöter på i pixelbaserad analys, som tekniken blev populär bland fjärranalytiker världen över. KTH-SEG är ett program utvecklat på KTH Geoinformatik avdelning. KTH-SEG är utvecklat för att segmentera bilder inför objektbaserad analys. Dessutom utför programmet klassificering. I det här arbetet utförs objektbaserad förändrings analys över ett område i Shanghai. För att hitta de förändringar som har skett har två tillvägsgångssätt använts: dels har analys av bilder efter klassificeringen gjorts och dels har bilder som i sig själva skall visa den förändring som har skett skapats, så kallade förändringsbilder. Bildernas pålitlighet är utvärderad genom att använda ”maximum likelihood report” i programmet Geomatica.   Segmentering och klassificering är gjort i programmet KTH-SEG, träningsområden och testområden är skapade i ArcGIS och förbehandling av bilder samt andra operationer är gjorda i Geomatica. KTH-SEG erbjuder många valmöjligheter för att påverka segmenteringsresultatet. Den är enkelt att använda och producerar tydliga klassificerade bilder som är användbara för analys. Resultatet utvärderas för att bestämma hur effektivt det är att använda objektbaserad förändrings analys av urbana områden och KTH-SEG utvärderas som ett segmenterings- och klassifikations verktyg. Resultaten visar att förändringsbilder ger ett sämre resultat än bilder som analyseras efter klassifikationen. Huruvida det dåliga resultatet på förändingsbilderna beror på andra omständigheter än tillvägagångssättet med objekt baserad klassifikation kan inte bestämmas. Mycket tyder dock på att det är valet av två bilder från olika satelliter som ger det dåliga resultatet.

No description available.

Soil erosion by water is a main form of land degradation worldwide. The problem has been addressed, among others, in the United Nations Sustainability Goals. However, for mitigation of erosion consequences and adequate management of affected areas, reliable information on the magnitude and spatial patterns of erosion is needed. Although such need is often addressed by erosion modelling, precise erosion monitoring is necessary for the calibration and validation of erosion models and to study erosion patterns in landscapes. Conventional methods for quantification of rill erosion are based on labour-intensive field measurements. In contrast, remote sensing techniques promise fast, non-invasive, systematic and larger-scale surveying. Thus, the main objective of this study was to develop and evaluate automated and transferable methodologies for mapping the spatial extent of erosion rills from a single acquisition of remote sensing data. Data collected by an uncrewed aerial vehicle was used to deliver a highly detailed digital elevation model (DEM) of the analysed area. Rills were classified by two methods with different settings. One approach was based on a series of decision rules applied on DEM-derived geomorphological terrain attributes. The second approach utilized the random forest machine learning algorithm. The methods were tested on three agricultural fields representing different erosion patterns and vegetation covers. Our study showed that the proposed methods can ensure recognition of rills with accuracies between 80 and 90% depending on rill characteristics. In some cases, however, the methods were sensitive to very small rill incisions and to similar geometry of rills to other features. Additionally, their performance was influenced by the vegetation structure and cover. Besides these challenges, the introduced approach was capable of mapping rills fully automatically at the field scale and can, therefore, support a fast and flexible assessment of erosion magnitudes.

Recently, there is a tremendous amount of high resolution imagery that wasn’t available years ago, mainly because of the advancement of the technology in capturing such images. Most of the very high resolution (VHR) imagery comes in three bands only the red, green and blue (RGB), whereas, the importance of using such imagery in remote sensing studies has been only considered lately, despite that, there are no enough studies examining the usefulness of these imagery in urban applications. This research proposes a method to investigate high resolution imagery to analyse an urban area using UAV imagery for land use and land cover classification. Remote sensing imagery comes in various characteristics and format from different sources, most commonly from satellite and airborne platforms. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become a very good potential source to collect geographic data with new unique properties, most important asset is the VHR of spatiotemporal data structure. UAV systems are as a promising technology that will advance not only remote sensing but GIScience as well. UAVs imagery has been gaining popularity in the last decade for various remote sensing and GIS applications in general, and particularly in image analysis and classification. One of the concerns of UAV imagery is finding an optimal approach to classify UAV imagery which is usually hard to define, because many variables are involved in the process such as the properties of the image source and purpose of the classification. The main objective of this research is evaluating land use / land cover (LULC) classification for urban areas, whereas the data of the study area consists of VHR imagery of RGB bands collected by a basic, off-shelf and simple UAV. LULC classification was conducted by pixel and object-based approaches, where supervised algorithms were used for both approaches to classify the image. In pixel-based image analysis, three different algorithms were used to create a final classified map, where one algorithm was used in the object-based image analysis. The study also tested the effectiveness of object-based approach instead of pixel-based in order to minimize the difficulty in classifying mixed pixels in VHR imagery, while identifying all possible classes in the scene and maintain the high accuracy. Both approaches were applied to a UAV image with three spectral bands (red, green and blue), in addition to a DEM layer that was added later to the image as ancillary data. Previous studies of comparing pixel-based and object-based classification approaches claims that object-based had produced better results of classes for VHR imagery. Meanwhile several trade-offs are being made when selecting a classification approach that varies from different perspectives and factors such as time cost, trial and error, and subjectivity.       Classification based on pixels was approached in this study through supervised learning algorithms, where the classification process included all necessary steps such as selecting representative training samples and creating a spectral signature file. The process in object-based classification included segmenting the UAV’s imagery and creating class rules by using feature extraction. In addition, the incorporation of hue, saturation and intensity (IHS) colour domain and Principle Component Analysis (PCA) layers were tested to evaluate the ability of such method to produce better results of classes for simple UAVs imagery. These UAVs are usually equipped with only RGB colour sensors, where combining more derived colour bands such as IHS has been proven useful in prior studies for object-based image analysis (OBIA) of UAV’s imagery, however, incorporating the IHS domain and PCA layers in this research did not provide much better classes. For the pixel-based classification approach, it was found that Maximum Likelihood algorithm performs better for VHR of UAV imagery than the other two algorithms, the Minimum Distance and Mahalanobis Distance. The difference in the overall accuracy for all algorithms in the pixel-based approach was obvious, where the values for Maximum Likelihood, Minimum Distance and Mahalanobis Distance were respectively as 86%, 80% and 76%. The Average Precision (AP) measure was calculated to compare between the pixel and object-based approaches, the result was higher in the object-based approach when applied for the buildings class, the AP measure for object-based classification was 0.9621 and 0.9152 for pixel-based classification. The results revealed that pixel-based classification is still effective and can be applicable for UAV imagery, however, the object-based classification that was done by the Nearest Neighbour algorithm has produced more appealing classes with higher accuracy. Also, it was concluded that OBIA has more power for extracting geographic information and easier integration within the GIS, whereas the result of this research is estimated to be applicable for classifying UAV’s imagery used for LULC applications.

Assessment of forest damage using satellite and lidar data Abstract The main objective of this thesis is to create a methodical procedure used for the evaluation of forest damage in the chosen area of the National Park Sumava, Czech Republic. In this work were combined the multispectral satellite data and data of airborne laser scanning. The forests in this area are heavily damaged mainly due to bark beetle outbreak. You can find here as healthy so damaged forests. Based on this methodology will be differentiated greater number of classes than I found in the literature. In this work was used pansharpened multispectral image SPOT, multispectral image Landsat and airborne laser scanning data with low density points. Another task was to get height information from ALS data in the form of grid. Forest stands were classified using object-oriented classification, which included at first segmentation and then creation of classification base. In classification entered spectral information and height information obtained from the ALS data. Forests were classified into 5 classes and accuracy of both classifications was evaluated using the error matrix and kappa coefficient. SPOT image classification reached kappa coefficient of 68,5 % and Landsat image classification reached kappa coefficient of 72,3 %. From the...

O crescimento acelerado das cidades e os reflexos desse aumento das populações urbanas é preocupação constante na atualidade. Nesse processo, o surgimento de ocupações precárias, especialmente nas regiões metropolitanas, torna-se uma das características mais explicitas, caracterizando a própria lógica de ocupação, uso e direito desigual ao território. O monitoramento dessas áreas, sua formação e expansão, são uma necessidade crescente, em diversos locais no mundo, visto que a inclusão dessas áreas à cidade formal é tido como gatilho para a melhoria das condições de vida de mais de 100 milhões de pessoas que vivem em favelas no mundo todo, como colocam as Metas de Desenvolvimento do Milênio propostas pela Organização das Nações Unidas. Contudo, para que os habitantes das favelas sejam atendidos em seu direito a uma vida digna, faz-se necessário seu conhecimento e principalmente quantas são e onde estão. Um importante instrumento, com relação benéfica entre tempo de aquisição, custo de aplicação e possibilidade de replicabilidade e transferência de conhecimento é o uso de dados de Sensoriamento Remoto. Estes possibilitam o estabelecimento de metodologias através de procedimentos de detecção de feições e classificação do uso do solo, para identificação dessas áreas. Não obstante, os métodos de classificação clássicos quando aplicados a imagens de altíssima resolução espacial não conseguem extrair de forma satisfatória, em determinados casos, informações para uso intraurbano. Nesse ínterim surgem novos paradigmas de classificação de imagens como a Análise Orientada a Objeto, onde o processo de classificação parte do objeto geográfico definido a partir da segmentação da imagem, aproximando o objeto de feições do mundo real. Sobre estes objetos é possível a aplicação de regras de pertinência e de contexto através de linguagens e softwares específicos que permitem a transposição do conhecimento humano de fotointerpretação relação contextual para o meio computacional. Este trabalho objetivou avaliar o uso desta técnica de classificação para a detecção e mapeamento de favelas no município de Taboão da Serra/SP, utilizando dados auxiliares para a caracterização destas áreas e seus graus e tipos de precariedade. Os resultados demonstram a validade da aplicação da técnica. / The accelerated growth of the cities and the reflections of the increase of the urban population has been a constant concern nowadays. In this process, the occurrence of precarious occupancies, mainly in the metropolitan regions, has become one of the most explicit characteristics, describing the logic of occupancy itself, unequal use and right to the territory. The monitoring of these areas, their lineup and expansion, are an increasing need in several places in the world, as the inclusion of these areas in the formal city is considered a trigger for the living conditions improvement of over 100 million people who live in slums all over the world, as the Developments Goals of the Millennium proposed by the United Nations Organization. However, in order to meet the rights to a dignified life of the slums inhabitants, it is necessary to know about them mainly their number and where they are. An important tool related to the beneficial relation among the acquisition time, application cost and possibility of applying again, and transference of knowledge is the use of data from Remote Sensing. These data make it possible to establish the methodologies through the detection of features procedures and classification of the land use for these areas identification. Nevertheless the classical methods of classification cannot obtain, in certain cases, information on the interurban use, in a satisfactory way. In the interim, new paradigms of images classification appear like the Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) which goes from the defined geographic object to the image segmentation, approaching the object to features of the real world. The application of pertinent rules and context over these objects is possible through specific languages and softwares that allow the transference of human knowledge of photo interpretation and contextual relation to the computing environment. This work aimed at evaluating the use of this classification technique for detection and zoning of slums in Taboão da Serra/SP town using supporting data for the areas characterization, its grades and kinds of precarious conditions. The results show the validity of the technique application.