Spatial–temporal analysis of land-use/land-cover (LULC) change as well as the monitoring and modeling of urban expansion are essential for the planning and management of urban environments. Such environments reflect the economic conditions and quality of life of the individual country. Urbanization is generally influenced by national laws, plans and policies and by power, politics and poor governance in many less-developed countries. Remote sensing tools play a vital role in monitoring LULC change and measuring the rate of urbanization at both the local and global levels. The current study evaluated the LULC changes and urban expansion of Jhapa district of Nepal. The spatial–temporal dynamics of LULC were identified using six time-series atmospherically-corrected surface reflectance Landsat images from 1989 to 2016. A hybrid cellular automata Markov chain (CA–Markov) model was used to simulate future urbanization by 2026 and 2036. The analysis shows that the urban area has increased markedly and is expected to continue to grow rapidly in the future, whereas the area for agriculture has decreased. Meanwhile, forest and shrub areas have remained almost constant. Seasonal rainfall and flooding routinely cause predictable transformation of sand, water bodies and cultivated land from one type to another. The results suggest that the use of Landsat time-series archive images and the CA–Markov model are the best options for long-term spatiotemporal analysis and achieving an acceptable level of prediction accuracy. Furthermore, understanding the relationship between the spatiotemporal dynamics of urbanization and LULC change and simulating future landscape change is essential, as they are closely interlinked. These scientific findings of past, present and future land-cover scenarios of the study area will assist planners/decision-makers to formulate sustainable urban development and environmental protection plans and will remain a scientific asset for future generations.

A hyperspectral image is typically corrupted by multiple types of noise including Gaussian noise and impulse noise. On the other hand, a hyperspectral image possesses a high correlation in its spectral dimensions, and its Casorati matrix has a very low rank. Inspired by the recent development of robust principal component analysis, which can be used to remove sparse and arbitrarily large noise from a low-rank matrix, we propose a joint weighted nuclear norm and total variation regularization method to denoise a hyperspectral image data. First, weighted nuclear norm regularization is constructed for sparse noise removal. Total variation regularization is then imposed on each band of the hyperspectral image to further remove the Gaussian noise. A concrete optimization algorithm is developed to implement the two-stage regularization. The combined approach is expected to effectively denoise hyperspectral images even with varying data structures and under varying imaging conditions. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real data sets validate the performance of our proposed method.

Deep learning methods used for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification often achieve greater accuracy than traditional algorithms but require large numbers of training epochs. To simplify model structures and reduce their training epochs, an end-to-end deep learning framework incorporating a spectral-spatial cascaded 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) with a convolutional long short-term memory (CLSTM) network, called SSCC, is proposed herein for HSI classification. The SSCC framework employs cascaded 3D CNN to learn the spectral-spatial features of HSIs and uses the CLSTM network to extract sequence features. Residual connections are used in SSCC to accelerate model convergence, with the outputs of previous convolutional layers concatenated as inputs for subsequent layers. Moreover, the data augmentation, parametric rectified linear unit, dynamic learning rate, batch normalization, and regularization (including dropout and L2) methods are used to increase classification accuracy and prevent overfitting. These attributes allow the SSCC framework to achieve good performance for HSI classification within 20 epochs. Three well-known datasets including Indiana Pines, University of Pavia, and Pavia Center were employed to evaluate the classification performance of the proposed algorithm. The GF-5 dataset of Anxin County, obtained from China’s recently launched spaceborne Advanced Hyperspectral Imager, was also used for classification experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SSCC framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with better training efficiency than other deep learning methods.

Large-scale crop mapping is essential for agricultural management. Phenological variation often exists in the same crop due to different climatic regions or practice management, resulting in current classification models requiring sufficient training samples from different regions. However, the cost of sample collection is more time-consuming, costly, and labor-intensive, so it is necessary to develop automatic crop mapping models that require only a few samples and can be extended to a large area. In this study, a new white bolls index (WBI) based on the unique canopy of cotton at the bolls opening stage was proposed, which can characterize the intensity of bolls opening. The value of WBI will increase as the opening of the bolls increases. As a result, the white bolls index can be used to detect cotton automatically from other crops. Four study areas in different regions were used to evaluate the WBI performance. The overall accuracy (OA) for the four study sites was more than 82%. Additionally, the dates when the opening stage of bolls begins can be determined based on the time series of WBI. The results of this research demonstrated the potential of the proposed approach for cotton mapping using sentinel-2 time series of remotely sensed data.

Accurate and timely information on the spatial distribution of crops is of great significance to precision agriculture and food security. Many cropland mapping methods using satellite image time series are based on expert knowledge to extract phenological features to identify crops. It is still a challenge to automatically obtain meaningful features from time-series data for crop classification. In this study, we developed an automated method based on satellite image time series to map the spatial distribution of three major crops including maize, rice, and soybean in northeastern China. The core method used is the nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique. However, the existing nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique cannot handle missing data, and it is not designed for subsequent classification tasks. Therefore, the nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithm Landmark–Isometric feature mapping (L–ISOMAP) is improved. The advantage of the improved L–ISOMAP is that it does not need to reconstruct time series for missing data, and it can automatically obtain meaningful featured metrics for classification. The improved L–ISOMAP was applied to Landsat 8 full-band time-series data during the crop-growing season in the three northeastern provinces of China; then, the dimensionality reduction bands were inputted into a random forest classifier to complete a crop distribution map. The results show that the area of crops mapped is consistent with official statistics. The 2015 crop distribution map was evaluated through the collected reference dataset, and the overall classification accuracy and Kappa index were 83.68% and 0.7519, respectively. The geographical characteristics of major crops in three provinces in northeast China were analyzed. This study demonstrated that the improved L–ISOMAP method can be used to automatically extract features for crop classification. For future work, there is great potential for applying automatic mapping algorithms to other data or classification tasks.

Remote sensing data and techniques are reliable tools for monitoring land cover and land-use change. For time-series change detection algorithms, detecting the breakpoints accurately is the key element. However, the current state-of-art algorithms are vulnerable to cloud/cloud shadow or noises in the time-series imagery. The objective of this study is to develop a new method to detect land cover change using Landsat imagery by integrating temporal, spectral and spatial information to increase the accuracy of breakpoints detection. In the temporal dimension, the time-series model is decomposed into seasonality and trend. Due to different land cover types corresponding to different seasonal characteristics, breakpoints exist only in the seasonal component. In the spectral dimension, two-step judgement is applied. The first judgement detects a change when the seasonal breakpoint positions are the same in different spectral bands. The second judgement involves detecting a changed pixel when the classification result indicates different types on either side of the breakpoint. In the spatial dimension, neighbour information is utilized to control the false-positive rate. Experimental results using all available Landsat images acquired between 2001 and 2006 in Kansas City, US, illustrate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed approach. All pixels were used for assessing the classification and change detection accuracy compared with National Land Cover Database products. The overall accuracy of classification into eight categories was about 81% and the accuracy of change detection was 88%. Maps of timing of breaks and change times are also provided in this article.