• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.112 no.4
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• pp.426-441
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• 2023

This study investigated the predictive accuracy of a model of landslide displacement in Jecheon-si, where a great number of landslides were triggered by heavy rain on both natural (non-clear-cut) and clear-cut slopes during August 2020. This was accomplished by applying three flow direction methods (single flow direction, SFD; multiple flow direction, MFD; infinite flow direction, IFD) and the degree of root cohesion to an infinite slope stability equation. The application assumed that the soil saturation and any changes in root cohesion occurred following the timber harvest (clear-cutting). In the study area, 830 landslide locations were identified via landslide inventory mapping from satellite images and 25 cm resolution aerial photographs. The results of the landslide modeling comparison showed the accuracy of the models that considered changes in the root cohesion following clear-cutting to be improved by 1.3% to 2.6% when compared with those not considered in the area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUROC) analysis. Furthermore, the accuracy of the models that used the MFD algorithm improved by up to 1.3% when compared with the models that used the other algorithms in the AUROC analysis. These results suggest that the discriminatory application of the root cohesion, which considers changes in the vegetation condition, and the selection of the flow direction method may influence the accuracy of landslide predictive modeling. In the future, the results of this study should be verified by examining the root cohesion and its dynamic changes according to the tree species using the field hydrological monitoring technique.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1255-1272
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• 2023

Satellite-based chlorophyll-a concentration, produced as a long-term time series, is crucial for global climate change research. The production of data without gaps through the merging of time-synthesized or multi-satellite data is essential. However, studies related to satellite-based chlorophyll-a concentration in the waters around the Korean Peninsula have mainly focused on evaluating seasonal characteristics or proposing algorithms suitable for research areas using a single ocean color sensor. In this study, a merging dataset of remote sensing reflectance from the geostationary sensor GOCI-II and polar-orbiting sensors (MODIS, VIIRS, OLCI) was utilized to achieve high spatial coverage of chlorophyll-a concentration in the waters around the Korean Peninsula. The spatial coverage in the results of this study increased by approximately 30% compared to polar-orbiting sensor data, effectively compensating for gaps caused by clouds. Additionally, we aimed to quantitatively assess accuracy through comparison with global chlorophyll-a composite data provided by Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative (OC-CCI) and GlobColour, along with in-situ observation data. However, due to the limited number of in-situ observation data, we could not provide statistically significant results. Nevertheless, we observed a tendency for underestimation compared to global data. Furthermore, for the evaluation of practical applications in response to marine disasters such as red tides, we qualitatively compared our results with a case of a red tide in the East Sea in 2013. The results showed similarities to OC-CCI rather than standalone geostationary sensor results. Through this study, we plan to use the generated data for future research in artificial intelligence models for prediction and anomaly utilization. It is anticipated that the results will be beneficial for monitoring chlorophyll-a events in the coastal waters around Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1341-1352
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• 2023

The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from satellite images is a crucial tool to monitor forests and agriculture for broad areas because the periodic acquisition of the data is ensured. However, optical sensor-based vegetation indices(VI) are not accessible in some areas covered by clouds. This paper presented a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based approach to retrieval of the optical sensor-based NDVI using machine learning. SAR system can observe the land surface day and night in all weather conditions. Radar vegetation indices (RVI) from the Sentinel-1 vertical-vertical (VV) and vertical-horizontal (VH) polarizations, surface elevation, and air temperature are used as the input features for an automated machine learning (AutoML) model to conduct the gap-filling of the Sentinel-2 NDVI. The mean bias error (MAE) was 7.214E-05, and the correlation coefficient (CC) was 0.878, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed method. This approach can be applied to gap-free nationwide NDVI construction using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images for environmental monitoring and resource management.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1321-1330
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• 2023

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is the most widely used remote sensing data in the agricultural field and is currently provided by most optical satellites. In particular, as high-resolution optical satellite images become available, the selection of optimal optical satellite images according to agricultural applications has become a very important issue. In this study, we aim to define the most optimal optical satellite image when monitoring NDVI in rice fields in Korea and derive the resolution-related requirements necessary for this. For this purpose, we compared and analyzed the spatial distribution and time series patterns of the Dangjin rice paddy in Korea from 2019 to 2022 using NDVI images from MOD13, Landsat-8, Sentinel-2A/B, and PlanetScope satellites, which are widely used around the world. Each data is provided with a spatial resolution of 3 m to 250 m and various periods, and the area of the spectral band used to calculate NDVI also has slight differences. As a result of the analysis, Landsat-8 showed the lowest NDVI value and had very low spatial variation. In comparison, the MOD13 NDVI image showed similar spatial distribution and time series patterns as the PlanetScope data but was affected by the area surrounding the rice field due to low spatial resolution. Sentinel-2A/B showed relatively low NDVI values due to the wide near-infrared band area, and this feature was especially noticeable in the early stages of growth. PlanetScope's NDVI provides detailed spatial variation and stable time series patterns, but considering its high purchase price, it is considered to be more useful in small field areas than in spatially uniform rice paddy. Accordingly, for rice field areas, 250 m MOD13 NDVI or 10 m Sentinel-2A/B are considered to be the most efficient, but high-resolution satellite images can be used to estimate detailed physical quantities of individual crops.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1283-1297
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• 2023

Mid-wave infrared (MWIR) imagery, due to its ability to capture the temperature of land cover and objects, serves as a crucial data source in various fields including environmental monitoring and defense. The KOMPSAT-3A satellite acquires MWIR imagery with high spatial resolution compared to other satellites. However, the limited spatial resolution of MWIR imagery, in comparison to electro-optical (EO) imagery, constrains the optimal utilization of the KOMPSAT-3A data. This study aims to create a highly visible MWIR fusion image by leveraging the edge information from the KOMPSAT-3A panchromatic (PAN) image. Preprocessing is implemented to mitigate the relative geometric errors between the PAN and MWIR images. Subsequently, we employ a pre-trained pixel difference network (PiDiNet), a deep learning-based edge information extraction technique, to extract the boundaries of objects from the preprocessed PAN images. The MWIR fusion imagery is then generated by emphasizing the brightness value corresponding to the edge information of the PAN image. To evaluate the proposed method, the MWIR fusion images were generated in three different sites. As a result, the boundaries of terrain and objects in the MWIR fusion images were emphasized to provide detailed thermal information of the interest area. Especially, the MWIR fusion image provided the thermal information of objects such as airplanes and ships which are hard to detect in the original MWIR images. This study demonstrated that the proposed method could generate a single image that combines visible details from an EO image and thermal information from an MWIR image, which contributes to increasing the usage of MWIR imagery.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1413-1425
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• 2023

The increasing frequency of wildfires due to climate change is causing extreme loss of life and property. They cause loss of vegetation and affect ecosystem changes depending on their intensity and occurrence. Ecosystem changes, in turn, affect wildfire occurrence, causing secondary damage. Thus, accurate estimation of the areas affected by wildfires is fundamental. Satellite remote sensing is used for forest fire detection because it can rapidly acquire topographic and meteorological information about the affected area after forest fires. In addition, deep learning algorithms such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and transformer models show high performance for more accurate monitoring of fire-burnt regions. To date, the application of deep learning models has been limited, and there is a scarcity of reports providing quantitative performance evaluations for practical field utilization. Hence, this study emphasizes a comparative analysis, exploring performance enhancements achieved through both model selection and data design. This study examined deep learning models for detecting wildfire-damaged areas using Landsat 8 satellite images in California. Also, we conducted a comprehensive comparison and analysis of the detection performance of multiple models, such as U-Net and High-Resolution Network-Object Contextual Representation (HRNet-OCR). Wildfire-related spectral indices such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized burn ratio (NBR) were used as input channels for the deep learning models to reflect the degree of vegetation cover and surface moisture content. As a result, the mean intersection over union (mIoU) was 0.831 for U-Net and 0.848 for HRNet-OCR, showing high segmentation performance. The inclusion of spectral indices alongside the base wavelength bands resulted in increased metric values for all combinations, affirming that the augmentation of input data with spectral indices contributes to the refinement of pixels. This study can be applied to other satellite images to build a recovery strategy for fire-burnt areas.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_2
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• pp.1605-1613
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• 2023

The physical properties of the ocean interior are determined by temperature and salinity. To observe them, we rely on satellite observations for broad regions of oceans. However, the satellite for salinity measurement, Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), has low temporal and spatial resolutions; thus, more is needed to resolve the fast-changing coastal environment. To overcome these limitations, the algorithm to use the Geostationary Ocean Color Imager-II (GOCI-II) of the Geo-Kompsat-2B (GK-2B) was developed as the inputs for a Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network (MPNN). The result shows that coefficient of determination (R²), root mean square error (RMSE), and relative root mean square error (RRMSE) between GOCI-II based sea surface salinity (SSS) (GOCI-II SSS) and SMAP was 0.94, 0.58 psu, and 1.87%, respectively. Furthermore, the spatial variation of GOCI-II SSS was also very uniform, with over 0.8 of R² and less than 1 psu of RMSE. In addition, GOCI-II SSS was also compared with SSS of Ieodo Ocean Research Station (I-ORS), suggesting that the result was slightly low, which was further analyzed for the following reasons. We further illustrated the valuable information of high spatial and temporal variation of GOCI-II SSS to analyze SSS variation by the 11th typhoon, Hinnamnor, in 2022. We used the mean and standard deviation (STD) of one day of GOCI-II SSS, revealing the high spatial and temporal changes. Thus, this study will shed light on the research for monitoring the highly changing marine environment.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_3
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• pp.979-995
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• 2023

As wildfires are difficult to predict, real-time monitoring is crucial for a timely response. Geostationary satellite images are very useful for active fire detection because they can monitor a vast area with high temporal resolution (e.g., 2 min). Existing satellite-based active fire detection algorithms detect thermal outliers using threshold values based on the statistical analysis of brightness temperature. However, the difficulty in establishing suitable thresholds for such threshold-based methods hinders their ability to detect fires with low intensity and achieve generalized performance. In light of these challenges, machine learning has emerged as a potential-solution. Until now, relatively simple techniques such as random forest, Vanilla convolutional neural network (CNN), and U-net have been applied for active fire detection. Therefore, this study proposed an active fire detection algorithm using state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning techniques using data from the Advanced Himawari Imager and evaluated it over East Asia and Australia. The SOTA model was developed by applying EfficientNet and lion optimizer, and the results were compared with the model using the Vanilla CNN structure. EfficientNet outperformed CNN with F1-scores of 0.88 and 0.83 in East Asia and Australia, respectively. The performance was better after using weighted loss, equal sampling, and image augmentation techniques to fix data imbalance issues compared to before the techniques were used, resulting in F1-scores of 0.92 in East Asia and 0.84 in Australia. It is anticipated that timely responses facilitated by the SOTA deep learning-based approach for active fire detection will effectively mitigate the damage caused by wildfires.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_4
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• pp.1135-1144
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• 2023

Many agricultural reservoirs in South Korea, constructed before 1970, have become aging facilities. The majority of small-scale reservoirs lack measurement systems to ascertain basic specifications and water levels, classifying them as unmeasured reservoirs. Furthermore, continuous sedimentation within the reservoirs and industrial development-induced water quality deterioration lead to reduced water supply capacity and changes in reservoir morphology. This study utilized Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) sensors, which provide elevation information and allow for the characterization of surface features, to construct high-resolution Digital Surface Model (DSM) and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data of reservoir facilities. Additionally, bathymetric measurements based on multibeam echosounders were conducted to propose an updated approach for determining reservoir capacity. Drone-based LiDAR was employed to generate DSM and DEM data with a spatial resolution of 50 cm, enabling the display of elevations of hydraulic structures, such as embankments, spillways, and intake channels. Furthermore, using drone-based hyperspectral imagery, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) were calculated to detect water bodies and verify differences from existing reservoir boundaries. The constructed high-resolution DEM data were integrated with bathymetric measurements to create underwater contour maps, which were used to generate a Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN). The TIN was utilized to calculate the inundation area and volume of the reservoir, yielding results highly consistent with basic specifications. Considering areas that were not surveyed due to underwater vegetation, it is anticipated that this data will be valuable for future updates of reservoir capacity information.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.552-561
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• 2023

The seafloor topography of Gomso Bay on the west coast of Korea was investigated using subtidal bathymetry and tidal-flat altimetry. Gomso Bay consists of 80% tidal flats and 20% subtidal zone, and is divided into an outer bay and an inner bay by the Jujincheon esturary channel. The outer bay tidal flat, has few tidal channels, has a concave topographic profile, and is characterized by the development of chenier and intertidal sand bars, giving it the appearance of gently sloping, dissipative beaches. The inner bay tidal flat has wide upper and middle tidal flats with a well-developed tidal channel system without cheniers. Moreover, the topographical cross-section between these tidal channels is convex upward, and shows the characteristics of a depositional environment greatly influenced by tidal channels and tidal action. An analysis of the horizontal movement of the tidal flat environment over the past 37 years investigating changes in the iso-depth lines in the Gomso-Bay tidal flat between 1981 and 2018 revealed that the Gomso-Bay tidal flat retreated gradually landward. As a result of analyzing the erosion and sedimentation characteristics of Gomso Bay, assuming that most of the water depth changes were due to changes in the elevation of the sea floor and sea level, an average of 1 cm (0 mm/y) of sediment was eroded in the outer bay over the past 37 years (1981-2018), In the inner bay, an average of 50 cm (14 mm/y) was deposited. Notably, the high tidal flats of the outer bay were largely eroded. Monitoring photographs of the coast showed that most of the erosion of the high tidal flats in the outer bay occurred in a short period around 1999 (probably 1997-2002), and that the erosion resulted from the erosion of sand dunes and high-tide beaches caused by temporarily greatly raised high tide levels and storms.