Land surface water mapping is one of the most important remote-sensing applications. However, water areas are spectrally similar and overlapped with shadow, making accurate water extraction from remote-sensing images still a challenging problem. This paper develops a novel water index named as NDWI-MSI, combining a new normalized difference water index (NDWI) and a recently developed morphological shadow index (MSI), to delineate water bodies from eight-band WorldView-2 imagery. The newly available bands (e.g. coastal, yellow, red-edge, and near-infrared 2) of WorldView-2 imagery provide more potential for constructing new NDWIs derived from various band combinations. Through our testing, a new NDWI is defined in this study. In addition, MSI, a recently developed automatic shadow extraction index from high-resolution imagery can be used to indicate shadow areas. The NDWI-MSI is created by combining NDWI and MSI, which is able to highlight water bodies and simultaneously suppress shadow areas. In experiments, it is shown that the new water index can achieve better performance than traditional NDWI, and even supervised classifiers, for example, maximum likelihood classifier, and support vector machine.

The classical Least-Squares (LS) adjustment has been widely used in processing and analysing observations from Global Satellite Navigation System (GNSS). However, in detecting temporal correlations of GNSS observations, which can be described by means of autoregressive (AR) process, the LS method may not provide reliable estimates of process coefficients, since the Yule-Walker (YW) equations refer to structured Errors-In-Variables (EIV) equations. In this contribution, we proposed a Total Least-Squares (TLS) solution with the singular cofactor matrix to solve the YW equations. The proposed TLS solution is obtained based on the fact that random errors belong to column space of its cofactor matrix. In addition the proposed solution does not need any substitution of the squared true parameter vector as done by the current publications. Finally, we simulate the AR process to prove that our solution is more reliable than the existing methods.

The modern GNSS technique is one of the most effective geoscience and remote-sensing tool to observe crustal motions and quantify plate tectonics dynamics. Given multiple installed continuously operating GNSS observing stations, the multi-frame transformation is implemented to connect the timevarying GNSS coordinates by the traditional step-wise method. Compared with the step-wise treatment of each pair of frames, the proposed structured total least-squares method considers the combined estimation for all frames, guaranteeing unique and consistent results for the multi-frame symmetric transformation. Furthermore, we introduce the variance component as the nutshell and flexible indicator for land movement. The variance components can quantify the movement coordinate-wise, regional-wise, or frame-wise if the variance components are estimable as we analyze. The simulated experiment shows that the multi-frame symmetric transformation is statistically superior to the traditional stepwise treatment. For the application, the deformation caused by Tohoku earthquake that happened in 2011 in northeast Japan is analyzed.

Datum transformations are a fundamental issue in geodesy, Global Positioning System (GPS) science and technology, geographical information science (GIS), and other research fields. In this study, we establish a general total least squares (TLS) theory which allows the errors-in-variables model with different constraints to formulate all transformation models, including affine, orthogonal, similarity, and rigid transformations. Through the adaptation of the transformation models to the constrained TLS problem, the nonlinear constrained normal equation is analytically derived, and the transformation parameters can be iteratively estimated by fixed-point formulas. We also provide the statistical characteristics of the parameter estimator and the unit of precision of the control points. Two examples are given, as well as an analysis of the results on how the estimated quantities vary when the number of constraints becomes larger.