The recognition of postearthquake scenes plays an important role in postearthquake rescue and reconstruction. To overcome the over-reliance on expert visual interpretation and the poor recognition performance of traditional machine learning in postearthquake scene recognition, this paper proposes a postearthquake multiple scene recognition (PEMSR) model based on the classical deep learning Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) method. In this paper, a labeled postearthquake scenes dataset is constructed by segmenting acquired remote sensing images, which are classified into six categories: landslide, houses, ruins, trees, clogged and ponding. Due to the insufficiency and imbalance of the original dataset, transfer learning and a data augmentation and balancing strategy are utilized in the PEMSR model. To evaluate the PEMSR model, the evaluation metrics of precision, recall and F1 score are used in the experiment. Multiple experimental test results demonstrate that the PEMSR model shows a stronger performance in postearthquake scene recognition. The PEMSR model improves the detection accuracy of each scene compared with SSD by transfer learning and data augmentation strategy. In addition, the average detection time of the PEMSR model only needs 0.4565s, which is far less than the 8.3472s of the traditional Histogram of Oriented Gradient + Support Vector Machine (HOG+SVM) method.

Street view image retrieval aims to estimate the image locations by querying the nearest neighbor images with the same scene from a large-scale reference dataset. Query images usually have no location information and are represented by features to search for similar results. The deep local features (DELF) method shows great performance in the landmark retrieval task, but the method extracts many features so that the feature file is too large to load into memory when training the features index. The memory size is limited, and removing the part of features simply causes a great retrieval precision loss. Therefore, this paper proposes a grid feature-point selection method (GFS) to reduce the number of feature points in each image and minimize the precision loss. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are constructed to extract dense features, and an attention module is embedded into the network to score features. GFS divides the image into a grid and selects features with local region high scores. Product quantization and an inverted index are used to index the image features to improve retrieval efficiency. The retrieval performance of the method is tested on a large-scale Hong Kong street view dataset, and the results show that the GFS reduces feature points by 32.27–77.09% compared with the raw feature. In addition, GFS has a 5.27–23.59% higher precision than other methods.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to many deaths and economic disruptions across the world. Several studies have examined the effect of corresponding health risk factors in different places, but the problem of spatial heterogeneity has not been adequately addressed. The purpose of this paper was to explore how selected health risk factors are related to the pandemic infection rate within different study extents and to reveal the spatial varying characteristics of certain health risk factors. An eigenvector spatial filtering-based spatially varying coefficient model (ESF-SVC) was developed to find out how the influence of selected health risk factors varies across space and time. The ESF-SVC was able to take good control of over-fitting problems compared with ordinary least square (OLS), eigenvector spatial filtering (ESF) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models, with a higher adjusted R² and lower cross validation RMSE. The impact of health risk factors varied as the study extent changed: In Hubei province, only population density and wind speed showed significant spatially constant impact; while in mainland China, other factors including migration score, building density, temperature and altitude showed significant spatially varying impact. The influence of migration score was less contributive and less significant in cities around Wuhan than cities further away, while altitude showed a stronger contribution to the decrease of infection rates in high altitude cities. The temperature showed mixed correlation as time passed, with positive and negative coefficients at 2.42 °C and 8.17 °C, respectively. This study could provide a feasible path to improve the model fit by considering the problem of spatial autocorrelation and heterogeneity that exists in COVID-19 modeling. The yielding ESF-SVC coefficients could also provide an intuitive method for discovering the different impacts of influencing factors across space in large study areas. It is hoped that these findings improve public and governmental awareness of potential health risks and therefore influence epidemic control strategies.