• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.777-788
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• 2021

Since aerosol has a relatively short duration and significant spatial variation, satellite observations become more important for the spatially and temporally continuous quantification of aerosol. However, optical remote sensing has the disadvantage that it cannot detect AOD (Aerosol Optical Depth) for the regions covered by clouds or the regions with extremely high concentrations. Such missing values can increase the data uncertainty in the analyses of the Earth's environment. This paper presents a spatial gap-filling framework using a univariate statistical method such as DCT-PLS (Discrete Cosine Transform-based Penalized Least Square Regression) and FMM (Fast Matching Method) inpainting. We conducted a feasibility test for the hourly AOD product from AHI (Advanced Himawari Imager) between January 1 and December 31, 2019, and compared the accuracy statistics of the two spatial gap-filling methods. When the null-pixel area is not very large (null-pixel ratio < 0.6), the validation statistics of DCT-PLS and FMM techniques showed high accuracy of CC=0.988 (MAE=0.020) and CC=0.980 (MAE=0.028), respectively. Together with the AI-based gap-filling method using extra explanatory variables, the DCT-PLS and FMM techniques can be tested for the low-resolution images from the AMI (Advanced Meteorological Imager) of GK2A (Geostationary Korea Multi-purpose Satellite 2A), GEMS (Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer) and GOCI2 (Geostationary Ocean Color Imager) of GK2B (Geostationary Korea Multi-purpose Satellite 2B) and the high-resolution images from the CAS500 (Compact Advanced Satellite) series soon.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.459-466
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• 2023

In the last decade, artificial intelligence's dramatic advancement with the development of various deep learning techniques has significantly contributed to remote sensing fields and satellite image applications. Among many prominent areas, super-resolution research has seen substantial growth with the release of several benchmark datasets and the rise of generative adversarial network-based studies. However, most previously published remote sensing benchmark datasets represent spatial resolution within approximately 10 meters, imposing limitations when directly applying for super-resolution of small objects with cm unit spatial resolution. Furthermore, if the dataset lacks a global spatial distribution and is specialized in particular land covers, the consequent lack of feature diversity can directly impact the quantitative performance and prevent the formation of robust foundation models. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a method to generate benchmark datasets by simulating the modulation transfer functions of the sensor. The proposed approach leverages the simulation method with a solid theoretical foundation, notably recognized in image fusion. Additionally, the generated benchmark dataset is applied to state-of-the-art super-resolution base models for quantitative and visual analysis and discusses the shortcomings of the existing datasets. Through these efforts, we anticipate that the proposed benchmark dataset will facilitate various super-resolution research shortly in Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_1
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• pp.1273-1283
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• 2022

Recently, forest fires have frequently occurred due to climate change, leading to human and property damage every year. The forest fire monitoring technique using remote sensing can obtain quick and large-scale information of fire-damaged areas. In this study, the Gangneung and Donghae forest fires that occurred in March 2022 were analyzed using the spectral band of Sentinel-2, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and the normalized difference water index (NDWI) to classify the affected areas of forest fires. The U-net based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) model was simulated for the fire-damaged areas. The accuracy of forest fire classification in Donghae and Gangneung classification was high at 97.3% (f₁=0.486, IoU=0.946). The same model used in Donghae and Gangneung was applied to Uljin and Samcheok areas to get rid of the possibility of overfitting often happen in machine learning. As a result, the portion of overlap with the forest fire damage area reported by the National Institute of Forest Science (NIFoS) was 74.4%, confirming a high level of accuracy even considering the uncertainty of the model. This study suggests that it is possible to quantitatively evaluate the classification of forest fire-damaged area using a spectral band and indices similar to that of the Compact Advanced Satellite 500 (CAS500-4) in the Sentinel-2.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_1
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• pp.647-660
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• 2022

To prepare an atmospheric correction model suitable for CAS500-4 (Compact Advanced Satellite 500-4), this letter examined an atmospheric correction experiment using Sentinel-2 images having similar spectral characteristics to CAS500-4. Studies to compare the atmospheric correction results depending on different Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) data are rarely found. We conducted a comparison of Fast Line-of-sight Atmospheric Analysis of Spectral Hypercubes (FLAASH), Sen2Cor, and Second Simulation of the Satellite Signal in the Solar Spectrum - Vector (6SV) version 1.1 and 2.1, using Geo-Kompsat 2A (GK2A) Advanced Meteorological Imager (AMI) and Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) AOD data. In this experiment, 6SV2.1 seemed more stable than others when considering the correlation matrices and the output images for each band and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.157-168
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• 2023

Image segmentation and supervised classification techniques are widely used to monitor the ground surface using high-resolution remote sensing images. In order to classify various objects, a process of defining a class corresponding to each object and selecting samples belonging to each class is required. Existing methods for extracting class samples should select a sufficient number of samples having similar intensity characteristics for each class. This process depends on the user's visual identification and takes a lot of time. Representative samples of the class extracted are likely to vary depending on the user, and as a result, the classification performance is greatly affected by the class sample extraction result. In this study, we propose an image classification technique that minimizes user intervention when extracting class samples by applying the histogram back-projection technique and has consistent intensity characteristics of samples belonging to classes. The proposed classification technique using histogram back-projection showed improved classification accuracy in both the experiment using hue subchannels of the hue saturation value transformed image from Compact Advanced Satellite 500-1 imagery and the experiment using the original image compared to the technique that did not use histogram back-projection.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.83-101
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• 2022

Accurate atmospheric correction is essential for the analysis of land surface and environmental monitoring. Aerosol optical depth (AOD) information is particularly important in atmospheric correction because the radiation attenuation by Mie scattering makes the differences between the radiation calculated at the satellite sensor and the radiation measured at the land surface. Thus, it is necessary to use high-quality AOD data for an appropriate atmospheric correction of high-resolution satellite images. In this study, we examined the Second Simulation of a Satellite Signal in the Solar Spectrum (6S)-based atmospheric correction results for the Sentinel-2 images in South Korea using raster AOD (MODIS) and single-point AOD (AERONET). The 6S result was overall agreed with the Sentinel-2 level 2 data. Moreover, using raster AOD showed better performance than using single-point AOD. The atmospheric correction using the single-point AOD yielded some inappropriate values for forest and water pixels, where as the atmospheric correction using raster AOD produced stable and natural patterns in accordance with the land cover map. Also, the Sentinel-2 normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) after the 6S correction had similar patterns to the up scaled drone NDVI, although Sentinel-2 NDVI had relatively low values. Also, the spatial distribution of both images seemed very similar for growing and harvest seasons. Future work will be necessary to make efforts for the gap-filling of AOD data and an accurate bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) model for high-resolution atmospheric correction. These methods can help improve the land surface monitoring using the future Compact Advanced Satellite 500 in South Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_1
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• pp.1445-1462
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• 2022

Compact Advanced Satellite 500-4 (CAS500-4), which is scheduled to be launched in 2025, is a mid-resolution satellite with a 5 m resolution developed for wide-area agriculture and forest observation. To utilize satellite images, it is important to establish a precision sensor model and establish accurate geometric information. Previous research reported that a precision sensor model could be automatically established through the process of matching ground control point (GCP) chips and satellite images. Therefore, to improve the geometric accuracy of satellite images, it is necessary to improve the GCP chip matching performance. This paper proposes an improved GCP chip matching scheme for improved precision sensor modeling of mid-resolution satellite images. When using high-resolution GCP chips for matching against mid-resolution satellite images, there are two major issues: handling the resolution difference between GCP chips and satellite images and finding the optimal quantity of GCP chips. To solve these issues, this study compared and analyzed chip matching performances according to various satellite image upsampling factors and various number of chips. RapidEye images with a resolution of 5m were used as mid-resolution satellite images. GCP chips were prepared from aerial orthographic images with a resolution of 0.25 m and satellite orthogonal images with a resolution of 0.5 m. Accuracy analysis was performed using manually extracted reference points. Experiment results show that upsampling factor of two and three significantly improved sensor model accuracy. They also show that the accuracy was maintained with reduced number of GCP chips of around 100. The results of the study confirmed the possibility of applying high-resolution GCP chips for automated precision sensor modeling of mid-resolution satellite images with improved accuracy. It is expected that the results of this study can be used to establish a precise sensor model for CAS500-4.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.39 no.6
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• pp.563-569
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• 2021

With the launch of Compact Advanced Satellite 500 series of various characteristics and the operation of KOMPSAT-3/3A, uses of high-resolution satellite images have been continuously increased. Especially, in order to provide satellite images in the form of ARD (Analysis Ready Data), various pre-processing such as geometric correction and radiometric correction have been developed. For pre-processing of high spatial satellite imagery, auxiliary information, such as solar zenith, solar azimuth and offnadir angle, should be required. However, most of the high-resolution satellite images provide the solar zenith and nadir angle for the entire image as a single variable. In this paper, the solar zenith and offnadir angle corresponding to each pixel of the image were calculated using RFM (Rational Function Model) and auxiliary information of the image, and the quality of extracted information were evaluated. In particular, for the utilization of pixel-based solar zenith and offnadir angle, pixel-based auxiliary data were applied in calculating the top of atmospheric reflectance, and comparative evaluation with a single constant-based top of atmospheric reflectance was performed. In the experiments using various satellite imagery, the pixel-based solar zenith and offnadir angle information showed a similar tendency to the auxiliary information of satellite sensor, and it was confirmed that the distortion was reduced in the calculated reflectance in the top of atmospheric reflectance.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.5_1
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• pp.1029-1042
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• 2021

As part of the next-generation Compact Advanced Satellite 500 (CAS500) project, CAS500-4 is scheduled to be launched in 2025 focusing on the remote sensing of agriculture and forestry. To obtain quantitative information on vegetation from satellite images, it is necessary to acquire surface reflectance through atmospheric correction. Thus, it is essential to develop an atmospheric correction method suitable for CAS500-4. Since the absorption and scattering characteristics in the atmosphere vary depending on the wavelength, it is needed to analyze the sensitivity of atmospheric correction parameters such as aerosol optical depth (AOD) and water vapor (WV) considering the wavelengths of CAS500-4. In addition, as CAS500-4 has only five channels (blue, green, red, red edge, and near-infrared), making it difficult to directly calculate key parameters for atmospheric correction, external parameter data should be used. Therefore, thisstudy performed a sensitivity analysis of the key parameters (AOD, WV, and O₃) using the simulated images based on Sentinel-2 satellite data, which has similar wavelength specifications to CAS500-4, and examined the possibility of using the products of GEO-KOMPSAT-2A (GK2A) as atmospheric parameters. The sensitivity analysisshowed that AOD wasthe most important parameter with greater sensitivity in visible channels than in the near-infrared region. In particular, since AOD change of 20% causes about a 100% error rate in the blue channel surface reflectance in forests, a highly reliable AOD is needed to obtain accurate surface reflectance. The atmospherically corrected surface reflectance based on the GK2A AOD and WV was compared with the Sentinel-2 L2A reflectance data through the separability index of the known land cover pixels. The result showed that two corrected surface reflectance had similar Seperability index (SI) values, the atmospheric corrected surface reflectance based on the GK2A AOD showed higher SI than the Sentinel-2 L2A reflectance data in short-wavelength channels. Thus, it is judged that the parameters provided by GK2A can be fully utilized for atmospheric correction of the CAS500-4. The research findings will provide a basis for atmospheric correction of the CAS500-4 in the future.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_3
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• pp.1061-1067
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• 2023

In this letter, we simulated an atmospheric correction for Sentinel-2 images, of which spectral bands are similar to Compact Advanced Satellite 500-4 (CAS500-4). Using the second simulation of the satellite signal in the solar spectrum - vector (6SV)2.1 radiation transfer model and random forest (RF), a type of machine learning, we developed an RF-based atmospheric correction model to simulate 6SV2.1. As a result, the similarity between the reflectance calculated by 6SV2.1 and the reflectance predicted by the RF model was very high.