• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.177-198
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• 2021

Existing change detection researches have been focused on changes of land use and land cover (LULC), damaged areas, or large vegetated and water regions. On the other hands, increased temporal and spatial resolution of satellite images are strongly suggesting the feasibility of change detection of small objects such as vehicles and ships. In order to check the feasibility, this paper analyzes the performance of existing pixel-based change detection methods over small objects. We applied pixel differencing, PCA (principal component analysis) analysis, MAD (Multivariate Alteration Detection), and IR-MAD (Iteratively Reweighted-MAD) to Kompsat-3A and Google Map images taken within 10 days. We extracted ground references for changed and non-changed small objects from the images and used them for performance analysis of change detection results. Our analysis showed that MAD and IR-MAD, that are known to perform best over LULC and large areal changes, offered best performance over small object changes among the methods tested. It also showed that the spectral band with high reflectivity of the object of interest needs to be included for change analysis.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1185-1193
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• 2023

The increasing interest in soil moisture data from satellite imagery for applications in hydrology, meteorology, and agriculture has led to the development of methods to produce variable-resolution soil moisture maps. Research on accurate soil moisture estimation using satellite imagery is essential for remote sensing applications. The purpose of this study is to generate a soil moisture estimation map for a test area using KOMPSAT-3/3A and KOMPSAT-5 SAR imagery and to quantitatively compare the results with soil moisture data from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission provided by NASA, with a focus on accuracy validation. In addition, the Korean Environmental Geographic Information Service (EGIS) land cover map was used to determine soil moisture, especially in agricultural and forested regions. The selected test area for this study is the western part of Jeju, South Korea, where input data were available for the soil moisture estimation algorithm based on the Water Cloud Model (WCM). Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery from KOMPSAT-5 HV and Sentinel-1 VV were used for soil moisture estimation, while vegetation indices were calculated from the surface reflectance of KOMPSAT-3 imagery. Comparison of the derived soil moisture results with SMAP (L-3) and SMAP (L-4) data by differencing showed a mean difference of 4.13±3.60 p% and 14.24±2.10 p%, respectively, indicating a level of agreement. This research suggests the potential for producing highly accurate and precise soil moisture maps using future South Korean satellite imagery and publicly available data sources, as demonstrated in this study.