• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.577-589
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• 2021

Drone mapping systems can be applied to many fields such as disaster damage investigation, environmental monitoring, and construction process monitoring. To integrate individual sensors attached to a drone, it was essential to undergo complicated procedures including time synchronization. Recently, a variety of composite sensors are released which consist of visual sensors and GPS/INS. Composite sensors integrate multi-sensory data internally, and they provide geotagged image files to users. Therefore, to use composite sensors in drone mapping systems, mapping accuracies from composite sensors should be examined. In this study, we analyzed the mapping accuracies of a composite sensor, focusing on the data acquisition area and pre-calibration effect. In the first experiment, we analyzed how mapping accuracy varies with the number of ground control points. When 2 GCPs were used for mapping, the total RMSE has been reduced by 40 cm from more than 1 m to about 60 cm. In the second experiment, we assessed mapping accuracies based on whether pre-calibration is conducted or not. Using a few ground control points showed the pre-calibration does not affect mapping accuracies. The formation of weak geometry of the image sequences has resulted that pre-calibration can be essential to decrease possible mapping errors. In the absence of ground control points, pre-calibration also can improve mapping errors. Based on this study, we expect future drone mapping systems using composite sensors will contribute to streamlining a survey and calibration process depending on the data acquisition circumstances.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_1
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• pp.535-543
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• 2022

A drone is used to diagnose crop growth and to provide information through images in the agriculture field. In the case of using high spatial resolution drone images, growth information for each object can be produced. However, accurate object detection is required and adjacent objects should be efficiently classified. The purpose of this study is to develop a Chinese cabbage object detection algorithm using multispectral reflectance images observed from drone and computer vision techniques. Drone images were captured between 7 and 15 days after planting a Chinese cabbage from 2018 to 2020 years. The thresholds of object detection algorithm were set based on 2019 year, and the algorithm was evaluated based on images in 2018 and 2019 years. The vegetation area was classified using the characteristics of spectral reflectance. Then, morphology techniques such as dilatation, erosion, and image segmentation by considering the size of the object were applied to improve the object detection accuracy in the vegetation area. The precision of the developed object detection algorithm was over 95.19%, and the recall and accuracy were over 95.4% and 93.68%, respectively. The F1-Score of the algorithm was over 0.967 for 2 years. The location information about the center of the Chinese cabbage object extracted using the developed algorithm will be used as data to provide decision-making information during the growing season of crops.

• Journal of Bio-Environment Control
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.366-376
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• 2023

This study was conducted to develop a model for predicting the growth of kimchi cabbage using image data and environmental data. Kimchi cabbages of the 'Cheongmyeong Gaual' variety were planted three times on July 11th, July 19th, and July 27th at a test field located at Pyeongchang-gun, Gangwon-do (37°37' N 128°32' E, 510 elevation), and data on growth, images, and environmental conditions were collected until September 12th. To select key factors for the kimchi cabbage growth prediction model, a correlation analysis was conducted using the collected growth data and meteorological data. The correlation coefficient between fresh weight and growth degree days (GDD) and between fresh weight and integrated solar radiation showed a high correlation coefficient of 0.88. Additionally, fresh weight had significant correlations with height and leaf area of kimchi cabbages, with correlation coefficients of 0.78 and 0.79, respectively. Canopy coverage was selected from the image data and GDD was selected from the environmental data based on references from previous researches. A prediction model for kimchi cabbage of biomass, leaf count, and leaf area was developed by combining GDD, canopy coverage and growth data. Single-factor models, including quadratic, sigmoid, and logistic models, were created and the sigmoid prediction model showed the best explanatory power according to the evaluation results. Developing a multi-factor growth prediction model by combining GDD and canopy coverage resulted in improved determination coefficients of 0.9, 0.95, and 0.89 for biomass, leaf count, and leaf area, respectively, compared to single-factor prediction models. To validate the developed model, validation was conducted and the determination coefficient between measured and predicted fresh weight was 0.91, with an RMSE of 134.2 g, indicating high prediction accuracy. In the past, kimchi cabbage growth prediction was often based on meteorological or image data, which resulted in low predictive accuracy due to the inability to reflect on-site conditions or the heading up of kimchi cabbage. Combining these two prediction methods is expected to enhance the accuracy of crop yield predictions by compensating for the weaknesses of each observation method.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_1
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• pp.497-510
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• 2022

Agricultural reservoirs are essential structures for water supplies during dry period in the Korean peninsula, where water resources are temporally unequally distributed. For efficient water management, systematic and effective monitoring of medium-small reservoirs is required. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides a way for continuous monitoring of those, with its capability of all-weather observation. This study aims to evaluate the applicability of SAR in monitoring medium-small reservoirs using Sentinel-1 (10 m resolution) and Capella X-SAR (1 m resolution), at Chari (CR), Galjeon (GJ), Dwitgol (DG) reservoirs located in Ulsan, Korea. Water detected results applying Z fuzzy function-based threshold (Z-thresh) and Chan-vese (CV), an object detection-based segmentation algorithm, are quantitatively evaluated using UAV-detected water boundary (UWB). Accuracy metrics from Z-thresh were 0.87, 0.89, 0.77 (at CR, GJ, DG, respectively) using Sentinel-1 and 0.78, 0.72, 0.81 using Capella, and improvements were observed when CV was applied (Sentinel-1: 0.94, 0.89, 0.84, Capella: 0.92, 0.89, 0.93). Boundaries of the waterbody detected from Capella agreed relatively well with UWB; however, false- and un-detections occurred from speckle noises, due to its high resolution. When masked with optical sensor-based supplementary images, improvements up to 13% were observed. More effective water resource management is expected to be possible with continuous monitoring of available water quantity, when more accurate and precise SAR-based water detection technique is developed.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_1
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• pp.521-535
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• 2023

When converting rice fields into fields,sorghum (sorghum bicolor L. Moench) has excellent moisture resistance, enabling stable production along with soybeans. Therefore, it is a crop that is expected to improve the self-sufficiency rate of domestic food crops and solve the rice supply-demand imbalance problem. However, there is a lack of fundamental statistics,such as cultivation fields required for estimating yields, due to the traditional survey method, which takes a long time even with a large manpower. In this study, U-Net was applied to RGB images based on unmanned aerial vehicle to confirm the possibility of non-destructive segmentation of sorghum cultivation fields. RGB images were acquired on July 28, August 13, and August 25, 2022. On each image acquisition date, datasets were divided into 6,000 training datasets and 1,000 validation datasets with a size of 512 × 512 images. Classification models were developed based on three classes consisting of Sorghum fields(sorghum), rice and soybean fields(others), and non-agricultural fields(background), and two classes consisting of sorghum and non-sorghum (others+background). The classification accuracy of sorghum cultivation fields was higher than 0.91 in the three class-based models at all acquisition dates, but learning confusion occurred in the other classes in the August dataset. In contrast, the two-class-based model showed an accuracy of 0.95 or better in all classes, with stable learning on the August dataset. As a result, two class-based models in August will be advantageous for calculating the cultivation fields of sorghum.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.90-103
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• 2017

This study analyzed the surface temperature characteristics of urban green spaces under high summer temperatures to clarify the functions of green spaces in reducing urban temperatures. We obtained accurate surface temperature data using highresolution unmanned aerial vehicle images of the survey site, which was an isolated green space in the city. We analyzed differences in the surface temperature by land cover type, vegetation type, species type, and the relationship between surface temperature and vegetation volume. Based on the results, among the land cover types, wetlands and forests had low temperatures and paving areas had very high temperatures. Regarding vegetation type, broad-leaved trees had lower temperatures than coniferous trees in forests. However, in planted areas, coniferous trees had lower temperatures than broad-leaved trees. The temperature of long grass was higher than that of short grass, which suggested that the volume of grass affected the temperature. Regarding forest species type, the temperature of broad-leaved Robinia pseudoacacia forest and mixed broad-leaved forest was lower than coniferous Pinus densiflora forest. There was a slight difference in temperature between R. pseudoacacia forest and mixed broad-leaved forest. The analysis of the relationship between vegetation volume and temperature by forest species type indicated a negative correlation, where the temperature decreased with increasing vegetation volume, similar to the results of previous studies. However, we found a weak positive correlation in R. pseudoacacia forest; therefore, an increase in volume may not reduce the surface temperature depending on the dominant species.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.27 no.9
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• pp.854-864
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• 2016

The use of small drone platform has become a popular topic in these days but its application for SAR operation has been little known due to the burden of the payload implementation. Drone platforms are distinguished from the conventional UAV system by the increased vulnerability to the turbulences, control-errors and poor motion stability. Consequently, sophisticated motion compensation may be required to guarantee the successful acquisition of high quality SAR imagery. Extremely limited power and mass budgets may prevent the use of additional hardwares for motion compensation and the difficulty of SAR focusing is further aggravated. In this paper, we have carried out a feasibility study of mico-SAR drone operation. We present the image acquisition results from the preliminary flight tests and a quality assessment is followed on the experimental SAR images. The in-flight motion errors derived from the unique drone movements are investigated and attempts have been made to compensate for the geometrical and phase errors caused by motions against the nominal trajectory. Finally, the successful operation of drone SAR system is validated through the focussed SAR images taken over test sites.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.565-572
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• 2018

Recently, UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) or drones have gained popularity for the engineering surveying and mapping because they enable the rapid data acquisition and processing as well as their operation cost is low. The applicable fields become much wider including the topographic monitoring, agriculture, and forestry. It is reported that the high geospatial accuracy is achievable with the drone photogrammetry for many applications. However most studies reported the best achievable mapping results using well-distributed ground control points though some studies investigated the impact of control points on the accuracy. In this study, we focused on the drone mapping of corridors such as roads and pipelines. The distribution and the number of control points along the corridor were diversified for the accuracy assessment. In addition, the effects of the camera self-calibration and the number of the image strips were also studied. The experimental results showed that the biased distribution of ground control points has more negative impact on the accuracy compared to the density of points. The prior camera calibration was favored than the on-the-fly self-calibration that may produce poor positional accuracy for the case of less or biased control points. In addition, increasing the number of strips along the corridor was not helpful to increase the positional accuracy.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.47-54
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• 2021

Calculation of quantity at construction sites is a factor that has a great influence on construction costs, and it is important to calculate accurate values. In this study, topographic model was created by using drone photogrammetry and drone LiDAR to estimate earthwork volume. ortho image and DSM (Digital Surface Model) were constructed for the study area by drone photogrammetry, and DEM (Digital Elevation Model) of the target area was established using drone LiDAR. And through accuracy evaluation, accuracy of each method are 0.034m, 0.35m in horizontal direction, 0.054m, 0.25m in vertical direction. Through the research, the usability of drone photogrammetry and drone LiDAR for constructing geospatial information was presented. As a result of calculating the volume of the study site, the UAV photogrammetry showed a difference of 1528.1㎥ from the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) survey performance, and the 3D Laser Scanner showed difference of 160.28㎥. The difference in the volume of earthwork is due to the difference in the topographic model, and the efficiency of volume calculation by drone LiDAR could be suggested. In the future, if additional research is conducted using GNSS surveying and drone LiDAR to establish topographic model in the forest area and evaluate its usability, the efficiency of terrain model construction using drone LiDAR can be suggested.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.245-257
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• 2023

The representative crop in the Republic of Korea, rice, is cultivated over extensive areas every year, which resulting in reduced resistance to pests and diseases. One of the major rice diseases, rice blast disease, can lead to a significant decrease in yields when it occurs on a large scale, necessitating early detection and effective control of rice blast disease. Drone-based crop monitoring techniques are valuable for detecting abnormal growth, but frequent image capture for potential rice blast disease occurrences can consume significant labor and resources. The purpose of this study is to early detect rice blast disease using remote sensing data, such as drone and satellite images, along with weather data. Satellite images was helpful in identifying rice cultivation fields. Effective detection of paddy fields was achieved by utilizing vegetation and water indices. Subsequently, air temperature, relative humidity, and number of rainy days were used to calculate the risk of rice blast disease occurrence. An increase in the risk of disease occurrence implies a higher likelihood of disease development, and drone measurements perform at this time. Spectral reflectance changes in the red and near-infrared wavelength regions were observed at the locations where rice blast disease occurred. Clusters with low vegetation index values were observed at locations where rice blast disease occurred, and the time series data for drone images allowed for tracking the spread of the disease from these points. Finally, drone images captured before harvesting was used to generate spatial information on the incidence of rice blast disease in each field.