Identifying Spatiotemporal Patterns in Land Use and Cover Samples from Satellite Image Time Series

Assessment of land use and land cover change detection and prediction using deep learning techniques for the southwestern coastal region, Goa, India

Understanding the connections between human activities and the natural environment depends heavily on information about land use and land cover (LULC) in the form of accurate LULC maps. Environmental monitoring using deep learning (DL) is rapidly growing to preserve a sustainable environment in the long term. For establishing effective policies, regulations, and implementation, DL can be a valuable tool for assessing environmental conditions and natural resources that will positively impact the ecosystem. This paper presents the assessment of land use and land cover change detection (LULCCD) and prediction using DL techniques for the southwestern coastal region, Goa, also known as the tourist destination of India. It consists of three components: (i) change detection (CD), (ii) quantification of LULC changes, and (iii) prediction. A new CD assessment framework, Spatio-Temporal Encoder-Decoder Self Attention Network (STEDSAN), is proposed for the LULCCD process. A dual branch encoder-decoder network is constructed using strided convolution with downsampling for the encoder and transpose convolution with upsampling for the decoder to assess the bitemporal images spatially. The self-attention (SA) mechanism captures the complex global spatial-temporal (ST) interactions between individual pixels over space-time to produce more distinct features. Each branch accepts the LULC map of 2 years as one of its inputs to determine binary and multiclass changes among the bitemporal images. The STEDSAN model determines the patterns, trends, and conversion from one LULC type to another for the assessment period from 2005 to 2018. The binary change maps were also compared with the existing state of the art (SOTA) CD methods, with STEDSAN having an overall accuracy of 94.93%. The prediction was made using an recurrent neural network (RNN) known as long short term memory network (LSTM) for the year 2025. Experiments were conducted to determine area-wise changes in several LULC classes, such as built-up (BU), crops (kharif crop (KC), rabi crop (RC), zaid crop (ZC), double/triple (D/T C)), current fallow (CF), plantation (PL), forests (evergreen forest (EF), deciduous forest (DF), degraded/scurb forest (D/SF) ), littoral swamp (LS), grassland (GL), wasteland (WL), waterbodies max (Wmx), and waterbodies min (Wmn). As per the analysis, over the period of 13 years, there has been a net increase in the amount of BU (1.25%), RC (1.17%), and D/TC( 2.42%) and a net decrease in DF (3.29%) and WL(1.44%) being the most dominant classes being changed. These findings will offer a thorough description of identifying trends in coastal areas that may incorporate methodological hints for future studies. This study will also promote handling the spatial and temporal complexity of remotely sensed data employed in categorizing the coastal LULC of a heterogeneous landscape.

Land Use and Land Cover Mapping Using Sentinel-2, Landsat-8 Satellite Images, and Google Earth Engine: A Comparison of Two Composition Methods

Accurate and real-time land use/land cover (LULC) maps are important to provide precise information for dynamic monitoring, planning, and management of the Earth. With the advent of cloud computing platforms, time series feature extraction techniques, and machine learning classifiers, new opportunities are arising in more accurate and large-scale LULC mapping. In this study, we aimed at finding out how two composition methods and spectral–temporal metrics extracted from satellite time series can affect the ability of a machine learning classifier to produce accurate LULC maps. We used the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing platform to create cloud-free Sentinel-2 (S-2) and Landsat-8 (L-8) time series over the Tehran Province (Iran) as of 2020. Two composition methods, namely, seasonal composites and percentiles metrics, were used to define four datasets based on satellite time series, vegetation indices, and topographic layers. The random forest classifier was used in LULC classification and for identifying the most important variables. Accuracy assessment results showed that the S-2 outperformed the L-8 spectral–temporal metrics at the overall and class level. Moreover, the comparison of composition methods indicated that seasonal composites outperformed percentile metrics in both S-2 and L-8 time series. At the class level, the improved performance of seasonal composites was related to their ability to provide better information about the phenological variation of different LULC classes. Finally, we conclude that this methodology can produce LULC maps based on cloud computing GEE in an accurate and fast way and can be used in large-scale LULC mapping.

Satellite Image Time Series Analysis for Big Earth Observation Data

The development of analytical software for big Earth observation data faces several challenges. Designers need to balance between conflicting factors. Solutions that are efficient for specific hardware architectures can not be used in other environments. Packages that work on generic hardware and open standards will not have the same performance as dedicated solutions. Software that assumes that its users are computer programmers are flexible but may be difficult to learn for a wide audience. This paper describes sits, an open-source R package for satellite image time series analysis using machine learning. To allow experts to use satellite imagery to the fullest extent, sits adopts a time-first, space-later approach. It supports the complete cycle of data analysis for land classification. Its API provides a simple but powerful set of functions. The software works in different cloud computing environments. Satellite image time series are input to machine learning classifiers, and the results are post-processed using spatial smoothing. Since machine learning methods need accurate training data, sits includes methods for quality assessment of training samples. The software also provides methods for validation and accuracy measurement. The package thus comprises a production environment for big EO data analysis. We show that this approach produces high accuracy for land use and land cover maps through a case study in the Cerrado biome, one of the world’s fast moving agricultural frontiers for the year 2018.

Long Time Series High-Quality and High-Consistency Land Cover Mapping Based on Machine Learning Method at Heihe River Basin

Long time series of land cover changes (LCCs) are critical in the analysis of long-term climate, environmental, and ecological changes. Although several moderate to fine resolution global land cover datasets have been publicly released and they show strong consistency at the global scale, they have large deviations at the regional scale; furthermore, high-quality land cover datasets from before 2000 are not available and the classification consistency among different datasets is not very good. Thus, long time series of land cover datasets with high quality and consistency are in great demand but they are still unavailable, even at the regional scale. The Landsat series of satellite imagery composed of eight successive satellites can be traced back to 1972 and it is, therefore, possible to produce a long time series land cover dataset. In addition, the newly available satellite data have the capability to construct time series satellite images and a time series analysis method such as LCMM can be employed for making high-quality land cover datasets. Therefore, by taking the advantages of the two categories of satellite data, we proposed a new time series land cover mapping method based on machine learning and it, thereafter, is applied to Heihe River Basin (HRB) for verification purposes. Firstly, the high-quality land cover datasets at HRB from 2011–2015, which were retrieved using the LCMM method, are used for quickly and accurately making training samples. Secondly, a strategy for transferring the training samples after 2011 to earlier years is established. Thirdly, the random forest model is employed to train the selected yearly samples and a land cover map for every year is subsequently made. Finally, comprehensive analysis and validation are carried out for evaluation. In this study, a long time series land cover dataset including 1986, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 is finally made and an average precision of about 90% is achieved. It is the longest time series land cover map with 30 m resolution at HRB and the dataset has good time continuity and stability.