Soil spectra are often measured in the laboratory, and there is an increasing number of large-scale soil spectral libraries establishing across the world. However, calibration models developed from soil libraries are difficult to apply to spectral data acquired from the field or space. Transfer learning has the potential to bridge the gap and make the calibration model transferrable from one sensor to another. The objective of this study is to explore the potential of transfer learning for soil spectroscopy and its performance on soil clay content estimation using hyperspectral data. First, a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) is used on Land Use/Land Cover Area Frame Survey (LUCAS) mineral soils. To evaluate whether the pre-trained 1D-CNN model was transferrable, LUCAS organic soils were used to fine-tune and validate the model. The fine-tuned model achieved a good accuracy (coefficient of determination (R²) = 0.756, root-mean-square error (RMSE) = 7.07 and ratio of percent deviation (RPD) = 2.26) for the estimation of clay content. Spectral index, as suggested as a simple transferrable feature, was also explored on LUCAS data, but did not performed well on the estimation of clay content. Then, the pre-trained 1D-CNN model was further fine-tuned by field samples collect in the study area with spectra extracted from HyMap imagery, achieved an accuracy of R² = 0.601, RMSE = 8.62 and RPD = 1.54. Finally, the soil clay map was generated with the fine-tuned 1D-CNN model and hyperspectral data.

The accurate and quick derivation of the distribution of damaged building must be considered essential for the emergency response. With the success of deep learning, there is an increasing interest to apply it for earthquake-induced building damage mapping, and its performance has not been compared with conventional methods in detecting building damage after the earthquake. In the present study, the performance of grey-level co-occurrence matrix texture and convolutional neural network (CNN) features were comparatively evaluated with the random forest classifier. Pre- and post-event very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery were considered to identify collapsed buildings after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Overall accuracy (OA), allocation disagreement (AD), quantity disagreement (QD), Kappa, user accuracy (UA), and producer accuracy (PA) were used as the evaluation metrics. The results showed that the CNN feature with random forest method had the best performance, achieving an OA of 87.6% and a total disagreement of 12.4%. CNNs have the potential to extract deep features for identifying collapsed buildings compared to the texture feature with random forest method by increasing Kappa from 61.7% to 69.5% and reducing the total disagreement from 16.6% to 14.1%. The accuracy for identifying buildings was improved by combining CNN features with random forest compared with the CNN approach. OA increased from 85.9% to 87.6%, and the total disagreement reduced from 14.1% to 12.4%. The results indicate that the learnt CNN features can outperform texture features for identifying collapsed buildings using VHR remotely sensed space imagery.

Earthquake is one of the most devastating natural disasters that threaten human life. It is vital to retrieve the building damage status for planning rescue and reconstruction after an earthquake. In cases when the number of completely collapsed buildings is far less than intact or less-affected buildings (e.g., the 2010 Haiti earthquake), it is difficult for the classifier to learn the minority class samples, due to the imbalance learning problem. In this study, the convolutional neural network (CNN) was utilized to identify collapsed buildings from post-event satellite imagery with the proposed workflow. Producer accuracy (PA), user accuracy (UA), overall accuracy (OA), and Kappa were used as evaluation metrics. To overcome the imbalance problem, random over-sampling, random under-sampling, and cost-sensitive methods were tested on selected test A and test B regions. The results demonstrated that the building collapsed information can be retrieved by using post-event imagery. SqueezeNet performed well in classifying collapsed and non-collapsed buildings, and achieved an average OA of 78.6% for the two test regions. After balancing steps, the average Kappa value was improved from 41.6% to 44.8% with the cost-sensitive approach. Moreover, the cost-sensitive method showed a better performance on discriminating collapsed buildings, with a PA value of 51.2% for test A and 61.1% for test B. Therefore, a suitable balancing method should be considered when facing imbalance dataset to retrieve the distribution of collapsed buildings.

Soil spectroscopy has experienced a tremendous increase in soil property characterisation, and can be used not only in the laboratory but also from the space (imaging spectroscopy). Partial least squares (PLS) regression is one of the most common approaches for the calibration of soil properties using soil spectra. Besides functioning as a calibration method, PLS can also be used as a dimension reduction tool, which has scarcely been studied in soil spectroscopy. PLS components retained from high-dimensional spectral data can further be explored with the gradient-boosted decision tree (GBDT) method. Three soil sample categories were extracted from the Land Use/Land Cover Area Frame Survey (LUCAS) soil library according to the type of land cover (woodland, grassland, and cropland). First, PLS regression and GBDT were separately applied to build the spectroscopic models for soil organic carbon (OC), total nitrogen content (N), and clay for each soil category. Then, PLS-derived components were used as input variables for the GBDT model. The results demonstrate that the combined PLS-GBDT approach has better performance than PLS or GBDT alone. The relative important variables for soil property estimation revealed by the proposed method demonstrated that the PLS method is a useful dimension reduction tool for soil spectra to retain target-related information.

The building is an indispensable part of human life which provides a place for people to live, study, work, and engage in various cultural and social activities. People are exposed to earthquakes, and damaged buildings caused by earthquakes are one of the main threats. It is essential to retrieve the detailed information of affected buildings after earthquakes. Very high-resolution satellite imagery plays a key role in retrieving building damage information since it captures imagery quickly and effectively after the disaster. In this paper, the pretrained Visual Geometry Group (VGG)Net model was applied for identifying collapsed buildings induced by the 2010 Haiti earthquake using pre- and post-event remotely sensed space imagery, and the fine-tuned pretrained VGGNet model was compared with the VGGNet model trained from scratch. The effects of dataset augmentation and freezing different intermediate layers were also explored. The experimental results demonstrated that the fine-tuned VGGNet model outperformed the VGGNet model trained from scratch with increasing overall accuracy (OA) from 83.38% to 85.19% and Kappa from 60.69% to 67.14%. By taking advantage of dataset augmentation, OA and Kappa went up to 88.83% and 75.33% respectively, and the collapsed buildings were better recognized with a larger producer accuracy of 86.31%. The present study showed the potential of using the pretrained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to identify collapsed buildings caused by earthquakes using very high-resolution satellite imagery.

Visible and near-infrared diffuse reflectance spectroscopy has been demonstrated to be a fast and cheap tool for estimating a large number of chemical and physical soil properties, and effective features extracted from spectra are crucial to correlating with these properties. We adopt a novel methodology for feature extraction of soil spectroscopy based on fractal geometry. The spectrum can be divided into multiple segments with different step–window pairs. For each segmented spectral curve, the fractal dimension value was calculated using variation estimators with power indices 0.5, 1.0 and 2.0. Thus, the fractal feature can be generated by multiplying the fractal dimension value with spectral energy. To assess and compare the performance of new generated features, we took advantage of organic soil samples from the large-scale European Land Use/Land Cover Area Frame Survey (LUCAS). Gradient-boosting regression models built using XGBoost library with soil spectral library were developed to estimate N, pH and soil organic carbon (SOC) contents. Features generated by a variogram estimator performed better than two other estimators and the principal component analysis (PCA). The estimation results for SOC were coefficient of determination (R²) = 0.85, root mean square error (RMSE) = 56.7 g/kg, the ratio of percent deviation (RPD) = 2.59; for pH: R² = 0.82, RMSE = 0.49 g/kg, RPD = 2.31; and for N: R² = 0.77, RMSE = 3.01 g/kg, RPD = 2.09. Even better results could be achieved when fractal features were combined with PCA components. Fractal features generated by the proposed method can improve estimation accuracies of soil properties and simultaneously maintain the original spectral curve shape.