Rapid urbanization and economic development have led to the development of heavy industry and structural re-equalization in mainland China. This has resulted in scattered and disorderly layouts becoming prominent in the region. Furthermore, economic development has exacerbated pressures on regional resources and the environment and has threatened sustainable and coordinated development in the region. The NASA Land Science Investigator Processing System (Land-SIPS) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer (VIIRS) 375-m active fire product (VNP14IMG) was selected from the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) to study the spatiotemporal patterns of heavy industry development. Furthermore, we employed an improved adaptive K-means algorithm to realize the spatial segmentation of long-order VNP14IMG and constructed heat source objects. Lastly, we used a threshold recognition model to identify heavy industry objects from normal heat source objects. Results suggest that the method is an accurate and effective way to monitor heat sources generated from heavy industry. Moreover, some conclusions about heavy industrial heat source distribution in mainland China at different scales were obtained. Those can be beneficial for policy-makers and heavy industry regulation.

The heavy industry in India has witnessed rapid development in the past decades. This has increased the pressures and load on the Indian environment, and has also had a great impact on the world economy. In this study, the Preparatory Project Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer (NPP VIIRS) 375-m active fire product (VNP14IMG) and night-time light (NTL) data were used to study the spatiotemporal patterns of heavy industrial development in India. We employed an improved adaptive K-means algorithm to realize the spatial segmentation of long-term VNP14IMG data and artificial heat-source objects. Next, the initial heavy industry heat sources were distinguished from normal heat sources using a threshold recognition model. Finally, the maximum night-time light data were used to delineate the final heavy industry heat sources. The results suggest, that this modified method is a much more accurate and effective way of monitoring heavy industrial heat sources, and the accuracy of this detection model was higher than 92.7%. The number of main findings were concluded from the study: (1) the heavy industry heat sources are mainly concentrated in the north-east Assam state, east-central Jharkhand state, north Chhattisgarh and Odisha states, and the coastal areas of Gujarat and Maharashtra. Many heavy industrial heat sources were also found around a line from Kolkata on the Eastern Indian Ocean to Mumbai on the Western Indian Ocean. (2) The number of working heavy industry heat sources (NWH) and, particularly, the total number of fire hotspots for each working heavy industry heat source area (NFHWH) are continuing to increase in India. These trends mirror those for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and total population of India between 2012 and 2017. (3) The largest values of NWH and NFHWH were in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha whereas the smallest negative values, the $Slope\_NWH$ in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh were also the two largest values in the whole country. The smallest negative values of $Slope\_NWH$ and $Slope\_NFHWH$ were in Haryana. The $Slope\_NFHWH$ in the mainland Gujarat had the second most negative value, while the value of the $Slope\_NWH$ was the third-highest positive value.

With the rapid development of remote-sensing technology and the increasing number of Earth observation satellites, the volume of image datasets is growing exponentially. The management of big Earth data is also becoming increasingly complex and difficult, with the result that it can be hard for users to access the imagery that they are interested in quickly, efficiently and intelligently. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a remote-sensing image-retrieval model based on an ensemble neural networks. This model can make full use of existing training data to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the initial retrieval of remote-sensing images and keep model simple. The retrieval of aerial images using the proposed model is compared with the results obtained using ten individual neural networks and two ensemble neural networks and the results show that the proposed approach has a high degree of precision. In addition, the coverage rate and mean precision show a dramatic improvement of more than 40% compared with existing methods based on normal way. And, the coverage ratio gets 86% for the top 10 return results.

Quarry sites result from human activity, which includes the removal of original vegetation and the overlying soil to dig out stones for building use. Therefore, the dynamics of the quarry area provide a unique view of human mining activities. Actually, the topographic changes caused by mining activities are also a result of the development of the local economy. Thus, monitoring the quarry area can provide information about the policies of the economy and environmental protection. In this paper, we developed a combined method of machine learning classification and quarry region analysis to estimate the quarry area in a quarry region near Beijing. A temporal smoothing based on the classification results of all years was applied in post-processing to remove outliers and obtain gently changing sequences along the monitoring term. The method was applied to Landsat images to derive a quarry distribution map and quarry area time series from 1984 to 2017, revealing significant inter-annual variability. The time series revealed a five-stage development of the quarry area with different growth patterns. As the study region lies on two jurisdictions—Tianjin and Hebei—a comparison of the quarry area changes in the two jurisdictions was applied, which revealed that the different policies in the two regions could impose different impacts on the development of a quarry area. An analysis concerning the relationship between quarry area and gross regional product (GRP) was performed to explore the potential application on socioeconomic studies, and we found a strong positive correlation between quarry area and GRP in Langfang City, Hebei Province. These results demonstrate the potential benefit of annual monitoring over the long-term for socioeconomic studies, which can be used for mining decision making.