Shallow water bathymetry is of great significance in understanding, managing, and protecting coastal ecological environments. Many studies have shown that both empirical models and deep learning models can achieve promising results from satellite imagery bathymetry inversion. However, the spectral information available today in multispectral or/and hyperspectral satellite images has not been explored thoroughly in many models. The Band-optimized Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BoBiLSTM) model proposed in this paper feeds only the optimized bands and band ratios to the deep learning model, and a series of experiments were conducted in the shallow waters of Molokai Island, Hawaii, using hyperspectral satellite imagery (PRISMA) and multispectral satellite imagery (Sentinel-2) with ICESat-2 data and multibeam scan data as training data, respectively. The experimental results of the BoBiLSTM model demonstrate its robustness over other compared models. For example, using PRISMA data as the source image, the BoBiLSTM model achieves RMSE values of 0.82 m (using ICESat-2 as the training data) and 1.43 m (using multibeam as the training data), respectively, and because of using the bidirectional strategy, the inverted bathymetry reaches as far as a depth of 25 m. More importantly, the BoBiLSTM model does not overfit the data in general, which is one of its advantages over many other deep learning models. Unlike other deep learning models, which require a large amount of training data and all available bands as the inputs, the BoBiLSTM model can perform very well using equivalently less training data and a handful of bands and band ratios. With ICESat-2 data becoming commonly available and covering many shallow water regions around the world, the proposed BoBiLSTM model holds potential for bathymetry inversion for any region around the world where satellite images and ICESat-2 data are available.

Hyperspectral data usually consists of hundreds of narrow spectral bands and provides more detailed spectral characteristics compared to commonly used multispectral data in remote sensing applications. However, highly correlated spectral bands in hyperspectral data lead to computational complexity, which limits many applications or traditional methods when applied to hyperspectral data. The dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral data becomes one of the most important pre-processing steps in hyperspectral data analysis. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been introduced to hyperspectral data band selection (BS); however, the current DRL methods for hyperspectral data BS simply remove redundant bands, lack the significance analysis for the selected bands, and the reward mechanisms used in DRL only take basic forms in general. In this paper, a new reward mechanism strategy has been proposed, and Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) is introduced during BS using DRL to improve the network stabilities and avoid local optimum. To verify the effect of the proposed BS method, land cover classification experiments were designed and carried out to analyze and compare the proposed method with other BS methods. In the land cover classification experiments, the overall accuracy (OA) of the proposed method can reach 98.37%, the average accuracy (AA) is 95.63%, the kappa coefficient (Kappa) is 97.87%. Overall, the proposed method is superior to other BS methods. Experiments have also shown that the proposed method works not only for airborne hyperspectral data (AVIRIS and HYDICE), but also for hyperspectral satellite data, such as PRISMA data. When hyperspectral data is applied to similar applications, the proposed BS method could be a candidate for the BS preprocessing options.

For many remote sensing applications, the instantaneous waterline on the image is critical boundary information to separate land and water and for other purposes. Accurate waterline extraction from satellite images is a desirable feature in such applications. Due to the complex topography of low tidal flats and their indistinct spatial and spectral characteristics on satellite imagery, the waterline extraction for tidal flats (especially at low tides) from remote sensing images has always been a technically challenging problem. We developed a novel method to extract waterline from satellite images, assuming that the waterline’s elevation is level. This paper explores the utilization of bathymetry during waterline extraction and presents a novel approach to tackle the waterline extraction issue, especially for low tidal flats, using remote sensing images at mid/high tide, when most of the tidal flat area is filled with seawater. Repeated optical satellite images are easily accessible in the current days; the proposed approach first generates the bathymetry map using the mid/high-tide satellite image, and then the initial waterline is extracted using traditional methods from the low-tide satellite image; the isobath (depth contour lines of bathymetry), which corresponds to the initial waterline is robustly estimated, and finally an area-based optimization algorithm is proposed and applied to both isobath and initial waterline to obtain the final optimized waterline. A series of experiments using Sentinel-2 multispectral images are conducted on Jibei Island of Penghu Archipelago and Chongming Island to demonstrate this proposed strategy. The results from the proposed approach are compared with the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) methods. The results indicate that more accurate waterlines can be extracted using the proposed approach, and it is very suitable for waterline extraction for tidal flats, especially at low tides.

Satellite-derived bathymetry enables the non-contact derivation of large-scale shallow water depths. Hyperspectral satellite images provide more information than multispectral satellite images, making them theoretically more effective and accurate for bathymetry inversion. This paper focuses on the use of hyperspectral satellite images (PRISMA) for bathymetry inversion and compares the retrieval capabilities of multispectral satellite images (Sentinel-2 and Landsat 9) in the southeastern waters of Molokai Island in the Hawaiian Archipelago and Yinyu Island in the Paracel Archipelago. This paper proposes an attention-based band optimization one-dimensional convolutional neural network model (ABO-CNN) to better utilize the increased spectral information from multispectral and hyperspectral images for bathymetry inversion, and this model is compared with a traditional empirical model (Stumpf model) and two deep learning models (feedforward neural network and one-dimensional convolutional neural network). The results indicate that the ABO-CNN model outperforms the above three models, and the root mean square errors of retrieved bathymetry using the PRISMA images are 1.43 m and 0.73 m in the above two study areas, respectively. In summary, this paper demonstrates that PRISMA hyperspectral imagery has superior bathymetry inversion capabilities compared to multispectral images (Sentinel-2 and Landsat 9), and the proposed deep learning model ABO-CNN is a promising candidate model for satellite-derived bathymetry using hyperspectral imagery. With the increasing availability of ICESat-2 bathymetric data, the use of a combination of the proposed ABO-CNN model and the ICEsat-2 data as the training data provides a practical approach for bathymetric retrieval applications.