Timely and accurate information about spatial distribution of tree species in urban areas provides crucial data for sustainable urban development, management and planning. Very high spatial resolution data collected by sensors onboard Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) systems provide rich data sources for mapping tree species. This paper proposes a method of tree species mapping from UAV images over urban areas using similarity in tree-crown object histograms and a simple thresholding method. Tree-crown objects are first extracted and used as processing units in subsequent steps. Tree-crown object histograms of multiple features, i.e., spectral and height related features, are generated to quantify within-object variability. A specific tree species is extracted by comparing similarity in histogram between a target tree-crown object and reference objects. The proposed method is evaluated in mapping four different tree species using UAV multispectral ortho-images and derived Digital Surface Model (DSM) data collected in Shanghai urban area, by comparing with an existing method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the comparative method for all four tree species, with improvements of 0.61–5.81% in overall accuracy. The proposed method provides a simple and effective way of mapping tree species over urban area.

Detection of urban land expansion is important for understanding the urbanization process and improving urban planning. Spatio-temporal contextual information derived from multitemporal high-resolution imagery is useful for highlighting urban land cover changes. This article proposes a new method for detecting urban built-up area change from multitemporal high spatial resolution imagery by combining spectral and spatio-temporal features. A multiband temporal texture measured using pseudo cross multivariate variogram (PCMV) is adopted to quantify the local spatio-temporal dependence between bitemporal multispectral images. The PCMV textures at multiple scales, bitemporal spectral features, and normalized difference vegetation indices are together input to an improved one-class random forest classifier for urban built-up area change mapping. The proposed method is evaluated in urban built-up area change detection using multitemporal Sentinel-2 images of Tianjin area acquired from 2015 to 2019. It is also compared with three feature combinations and an existing postclassification comparison method based on one-class support vector machine. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperformed the traditional ones, with increases of 2.15%-7.38%, 2.07%-5.45%, 1.93%-6.76%, and 5.98%-13.11% in overall accuracy. Moreover, the proposed method also achieves the best performance using the bitemporal Sentinel-2 images over the east of Beijing area. The proposed method is promising as a simple and reliable way to detect urban built-up area change with multitemporal Sentinel-2 imagery.

High-accuracy indoor positioning is a prerequisite to satisfy the increasing demands of position-based services in complex indoor scenes. Current indoor visual-positioning methods mainly include image retrieval-based methods, visual landmarks-based methods, and learning-based methods. To better overcome the limitations of traditional methods such as them being labor-intensive, of poor accuracy, and time-consuming, this paper proposes a novel indoor-positioning method with automated red, green, blue and depth (RGB-D) image database construction. First, strategies for automated database construction are developed to reduce the workload of manually selecting database images and ensure the requirements of high-accuracy indoor positioning. The database is automatically constructed according to the rules, which is more objective and improves the efficiency of the image-retrieval process. Second, by combining the automated database construction module, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based image-retrieval module, and strict geometric relations-based pose estimation module, we obtain a high-accuracy indoor-positioning system. Furthermore, in order to verify the proposed method, we conducted extensive experiments on the public indoor environment dataset. The detailed experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of our indoor-positioning method.