Visible images contain rich texture information, whereas infrared images have significant contrast. It is advantageous to combine these two kinds of information into a single image so that it not only has good contrast but also contains rich texture details. In general, previous fusion methods cannot achieve this goal well, where the fused results are inclined to either a visible or an infrared image. To address this challenge, a new fusion framework called generative adversarial network with multiclassification constraints (GANMcC) is proposed, which transforms image fusion into a multidistribution simultaneous estimation problem to fuse infrared and visible images in a more reasonable way. We adopt a generative adversarial network with multiclassification to estimate the distributions of visible light and infrared domains at the same time, in which the game of multiclassification discrimination will make the fused result to have these two distributions in a more balanced manner, so as to have significant contrast and rich texture details. In addition, we design a specific content loss to constrain the generator, which introduces the idea of main and auxiliary into the extraction of gradient and intensity information, which will enable the generator to extract more sufficient information from source images in a complementary manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of our GANMcC over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both qualitative effect and quantitative metric. Moreover, our method can achieve good fused results even the visible image is overexposed. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jiayi-ma/GANMcC.

Digital twins are considered to be a new starting point for today’s smart city construction. This paper defines the concepts of digital twins and digital twin cities, discusses the relationship between digital twins and smart cities, analyzes the characteristics of smart cities based on digital twins, and focuses on the five main applications of smart cities based on digital twins. Finally, we discuss the future development of smart cities based on digital twins.

Building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images is of great significance in urban planning, population statistics, and economic forecast. However, automatic building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images remains challenging. On the one hand, the extraction results of buildings are partially missing and incomplete due to the variation of hue and texture within a building, especially when the building size is large. On the other hand, the building footprint extraction of buildings with complex shapes is often inaccurate. To this end, we propose a new deep learning network, termed Building Residual Refine Network (BRRNet), for accurate and complete building extraction. BRRNet consists of such two parts as the prediction module and the residual refinement module. The prediction module based on an encoder–decoder structure introduces atrous convolution of different dilation rates to extract more global features, by gradually increasing the receptive field during feature extraction. When the prediction module outputs the preliminary building extraction results of the input image, the residual refinement module takes the output of the prediction module as an input. It further refines the residual between the result of the prediction module and the real result, thus improving the accuracy of building extraction. In addition, we use Dice loss as the loss function during training, which effectively alleviates the problem of data imbalance and further improves the accuracy of building extraction. The experimental results on Massachusetts Building Dataset show that our method outperforms other five state-of-the-art methods in terms of the integrity of buildings and the accuracy of complex building footprints.

Estimation of forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is crucial for various technical and scientific applications, ranging from regional carbon and bioenergy policies to sustainable forest management. However, passive optical remote sensing, which is the most widely used remote sensing data for retrieving vegetation parameters, is constrained by spectral saturation problems and cloud cover. On the other hand, LiDAR data, which have been extensively used to estimate forest structure attributes, cannot provide sufficient spectral information of vegetation canopies. Thus, this study aimed to develop a novel synergistic approach to estimating biomass by integrating LiDAR data with Landsat 8 imagery through a deep learning-based workflow. First the relationships between biomass and spectral vegetation indices (SVIs) and LiDAR metrics were separately investigated. Next, two groups of combined optical and LiDAR indices (i.e., COLI1 and COLI2) were designed and explored to identify their performances in biomass estimation. Finally, five prediction models, including K-nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, Support Vector Regression, the deep learning model, i.e., Stacked Sparse Autoencoder network (SSAE), and multiple stepwise linear regressions, were individually used to estimate biomass with input variables of different scenarios, i.e., (i) all the COLI1 (ACOLI1), (ii) all the COLI2 (ACOLI2), (iii) ACOLI1 and all the optical (AO) and LiDAR variables (AL), and (iv) ACOLI2, AO and AL. Results showed that univariate models with the combined optical and LiDAR indices as explanatory variables presented better modeling performance than those with either optical or LiDAR data alone, regardless of the combination mode. The SSAE model obtained the best performance compared to the other tested prediction algorithms for the forest biomass estimation. The best predictive accuracy was achieved by the SSAE model with inputs of combined optical and LiDAR variables (i.e., ACOLI1, AO and AL) that yielded an R² of 0.935, root mean squared error (RMSE) of 15.67 Mg/ha, and relative root mean squared error (RMSE_r) of 11.407%. It was concluded that the presented combined indices were simple and effective by integrating LiDAR-derived structure information with Landsat 8 spectral data for estimating forest biomass. Overall, the SSAE model with inputs of Landsat 8 and LiDAR integrated information resulted in accurate estimation of forest biomass. The presented modeling workflow will greatly facilitate future forest biomass estimation and carbon stock assessments.

Benchmark datasets are essential for developing and evaluating remote sensing image retrieval (RSIR) approaches. However, most of the existing datasets are single-labeled, with each image in these datasets being annotated by a single label representing the most significant semantic content of the image. This is sufficient for simple problems, such as distinguishing between a building and a beach, but multiple labels and sometimes even dense (pixel) labels are required for more complex problems, such as RSIR and semantic segmentation.We therefore extended the existing multi-labeled dataset collected for multi-label RSIR and presented a dense labeling remote sensing dataset termed "DLRSD". DLRSD contained a total of 17 classes, and the pixels of each image were assigned with 17 pre-defined labels. We used DLRSD to evaluate the performance of RSIR methods ranging from traditional handcrafted feature-based methods to deep learning-based ones. More specifically, we evaluated the performances of RSIR methods from both single-label and multi-label perspectives. These results demonstrated the advantages of multiple labels over single labels for interpreting complex remote sensing images. DLRSD provided the literature a benchmark for RSIR and other pixel-based problems such as semantic segmentation.

Learning powerful feature representations for image retrieval has always been a challenging task in the field of remote sensing. Traditional methods focus on extracting low-level hand-crafted features which are not only time-consuming but also tend to achieve unsatisfactory performance due to the complexity of remote sensing images. In this paper, we investigate how to extract deep feature representations based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for high-resolution remote sensing image retrieval (HRRSIR). To this end, several effective schemes are proposed to generate powerful feature representations for HRRSIR. In the first scheme, a CNN pre-trained on a different problem is treated as a feature extractor since there are no sufficiently-sized remote sensing datasets to train a CNN from scratch. In the second scheme, we investigate learning features that are specific to our problem by first fine-tuning the pre-trained CNN on a remote sensing dataset and then proposing a novel CNN architecture based on convolutional layers and a three-layer perceptron. The novel CNN has fewer parameters than the pre-trained and fine-tuned CNNs and can learn low dimensional features from limited labelled images. The schemes are evaluated on several challenging, publicly available datasets. The results indicate that the proposed schemes, particularly the novel CNN, achieve state-of-the-art performance.