Landslides that take place in mountain cities tend to cause huge casualties and economic losses, and a precise survey of landslide areas is a critical task for disaster emergency. However, because of the complicated appearance of the nature, it is difficult to find a spatial regularity that only relates to landslides, thus landslides detection based on only spatial information or artificial features usually performs poorly. In this paper, an automated landslides detection approach that is aiming at mountain cities has been proposed based on pre- and post-event remote sensing images, it mainly utilizes the knowledge of landslide-related surface covering changes, and makes full use of the temporal and spatial information. A change detection method using Deep Convolution Neural Network (DCNN) was introduced to extract the areas where drastic alterations have taken place; then, focusing on the changed areas, the Spatial Temporal Context Learning (STCL) was conducted to identify the landslides areas; finally, we use slope degree which is derived from digital elevation model (DEM) to make the result more reliable, and the change of DEM is used for making the detected areas more complete. The approach was applied to detecting the landslides in Shenzhen, Zhouqu County and Beichuan County in China, and a quantitative accuracy assessment has been taken. The assessment indicates that this approach can guarantee less commission error of landslide areal extent which is below 17.6% and achieves a quality percentage above 61.1%, and for landslide areas, the detection percentage is also competitive, the experimental results proves the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed approach for the detection landslides in mountain cities.

The “watershed transformation” is a well‐known powerful tool for automated image segmentation. However, it is often computationally expensive and can produce over‐segmentation in situations of high gradient noise, quantity error and detailed texture. Here, a new method has been designed to overcome these inherent drawbacks. After pre‐processing the imagery using a nonlinear filter in order to filter the noise, an optimized watershed transformation is applied to provide an initial segmentation result. Then, a multi‐scale, multi‐characteristic merging algorithm is used to refine the segmentation. Preliminary results show promise in term of both segmentation quality and computational efficiency.

Extended from superpixel segmentation by adding an additional constraint on temporal consistency, supervoxel segmentation is to partition video frames into atomic segments. In this work, we propose a novel scheme for supervoxel segmentation to address the problem of new and moving objects, where the segmentation is performed on every two consecutive frames and thus each internal frame has two valid superpixel segmentations. This scheme provides coarse-grained parallel ability, and subsequent algorithms can validate their result using two segmentations that will further improve robustness. To implement this scheme, a voxel-related Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is proposed, in which each supervoxel is assumed to be distributed in a local region and represented by two Gaussian distributions that share the same color parameters to capture temporal consistency. Our algorithm has a lower complexity with respect to frame size than the traditional GMM. According to our experiments, it also outperforms the state-of-the-art in accuracy.

High-resolution satellite images offer abundant information on the Earth's surface for remote-sensing applications. The traditional pixel-based image classification method only used by spectral information has been proved to have several drawbacks. To satisfactorily interpret high-resolution imagery, other important information such as geometry, texture and semantics must be used, which are represented not only in single pixels but in meaningful image objects. So, a modified high-resolution image classification algorithm with multi-characteristics based on objects is presented in this article. First, image objects are extracted by multi-scale multi-characteristic segmentation. Second, characteristics such as spectral information, geometry, texture and semantics are extracted by the corresponding extraction algorithm. Finally, the image objects are classified by means of fuzzy-logic classification with a weighted average calculation method. Preliminary results show promise in terms of classification quality and accuracy.