The formation of black-odor water in urban rivers has a long history. It not only seriously affects the image of the city, but also easily breeds germs and damages the urban habitat. The prevention and treatment of urban black-odor water have long been important topics nationwide. “Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Water Pollution” issued by the State Council shows Chinese government’s high attention to this issue. However, treatment and monitoring are inextricably linked. There are few studies on the large-scale monitoring of black-odor water, especially the cases of using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to efficiently and accurately monitor the spatial distribution of urban river pollution. Therefore, in order to get rid of the limitations of traditional ground sampling to evaluate the point source pollution of rivers, the UAV-borne hyperspectral imagery was applied in this paper. It is hoped to grasp the pollution status of the entire river as soon as possible from the surface. However, the retrieval of multiple water quality parameters will lead to cumulative errors, so the Nemerow comprehensive pollution index (NCPI) is introduced to characterize the pollution level of urban water. In the paper, the retrieval results of six regression models including gradient boosting decision tree regression (GBDTR) were compared, trying to find a regression model for the retrieval NCPI in the current scenario. In the first study area, the retrieval accuracy of the training dataset (adjusted_R² = 0.978), and test dataset (adjusted_R² = 0.974) was higher than that of the other regression models. Although the retrieval effect of random forest is similar to that of GBDTR in both training accuracy and image inversion, it is more computationally expensive. Finally, the spatial distribution graphs of NCPI and its technical feasibility in monitoring pollution sources were investigated, in combination with field observations.

Suspended solids concentration (SSC) is an important indicator of the degree of water pollution. However, when using an empirical or semi-empirical model adapted to some of the inland waters to estimate SSC on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-borne hyperspectral images, the accuracy is often not sufficient. Thus, in this study, we attempted to use the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to find the optimal parameters of the least-squares support vector machine (LSSVM) model for the quantitative inversion of SSC. A reservoir and a polluted riverway were selected as the study areas. The spectral data of the 36-point and 29-point 400–900 nm wavelength range on the UAV-borne images were extracted. Compared with the semi-empirical model, the random forest (RF) algorithm and the competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) algorithm combined with partial least squares (PLS), the accuracy of the PSO-LSSVM algorithm in predicting the SSC was significantly improved. The training samples had a coefficient of determination ( $R^2$ ) of 0.98, a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.68 mg/L, and a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 12.66% at the reservoir. For the polluted riverway, PSO-LSSVM also performed well. Finally, the established SSC inversion model was applied to UAV-borne hyperspectral remote sensing (HRS) images. The results confirmed that the distribution of the predicted SSC was consistent with the observed results in the field, which proves that PSO-LSSVM is a feasible approach for the SSC inversion of UAV-borne HRS images.

In this study, in order to solve the difficulty of the inversion of soil arsenic (As) content using laboratory and field reflectance spectroscopy, we examined the transferability of the prediction method. Sixty-three soil samples from the Daye city area of the Jianghan Plain region of China were taken and studied in this research. The characteristic wavelengths of soil As content were then extracted from the full bands based on iteratively retaining informative variables (IRIV) coupled with Spearman’s rank correlation analysis (SCA). Firstly, the IRIV algorithm was used to roughly select the original spectral data. Gaussian filtering (GF), first derivative (FD) filtering, and gaussian filtering again (GFA) pretreatments were then used to improve the correlation between the spectra and soil As content. A subset with absolute correlation values greater than 0.6 was then retained as the optimal subset after each pretreatment. Finally, partial least squares regression (PLSR), Bayesian ridge regression (BRR), ridge regression (RR), kernel ridge regression (KRR), support vector machine regression (SVMR), eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) regression, and random forest regression (RFR) models were used to estimate the soil As values using the different characteristic variables. The results showed that, compared with the traditional method based on IRIV, using the characteristic bands selected by the IRIV-SCA method can effectively improve the prediction accuracy of the models. For the laboratory spectra experiment stage, the six most representative characteristic bands were selected. The performance of IRIV-SCA-SVMR was found to be the best, with the coefficient of determination (R²), root-mean-square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE) in the validation set being 0.97, 0.22, and 0.11, respectively. For the field spectra experiment stage, the 12 most representative characteristic bands were selected. The performance of IRIV-SCA-XGBoost was found to be the best, with the R², RMSE, and MAE in the validation set being 0.83, 0.35, and 0.29, respectively. The accuracy and stability of the inversion of soil As content are significantly improved by the use of the proposed method, and the method could be used to provide accurate data for decision support for the treatment and recovery of As pollution over a large area.

The precise classification of crop types is an important basis of agricultural monitoring and crop protection. With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, UAV-borne hyperspectral remote sensing imagery with high spatial resolution has become the ideal data source for the precise classification of crops. For precise classification of crops with a wide variety of classes and varied spectra, the traditional spectral-based classification method has difficulty in mining large-scale spatial information and maintaining the detailed features of the classes. Therefore, a precise crop classification method using spectral-spatial-location fusion based on conditional random fields (SSLF-CRF) for UAV-borne hyperspectral remote sensing imagery is proposed in this paper. The proposed method integrates the spectral information, the spatial context, the spatial features, and the spatial location information in the conditional random field model by the probabilistic potentials, providing complementary information for the crop discrimination from different perspectives. The experimental results obtained with two UAV-borne high spatial resolution hyperspectral images confirm that the proposed method can solve the problems of large-scale spatial information modeling and spectral variability, improving the classification accuracy for each crop type. This method has important significance for the precise classification of crops in hyperspectral remote sensing imagery.

Chlorophyll content is an important indicator of plant photosynthesis, which directly affects the growth and yield of crops. Using hyperspectral imaging technology to quickly and non-destructively estimate the soil plant analysis development (SPAD) value of pepper leaf and its distribution inversion is of great significance for agricultural monitoring and precise fertilization during pepper growth. In this study, 150 samples of pepper leaves with different leaf positions were selected, and the hyperspectral image data and SPAD value were collected for the sampled leaves. The correlation coefficient, stability competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (sCARS), and iteratively retaining informative variables (IRIV) methods were used to screen characteristic bands. These were combined with partial least-squares regression (PLSR), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), random forest regression (RFR), and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) to build regression models. The developed model was then used to build the inversion map of pepper leaf chlorophyll distribution. The research results show that: (1) The IRIV-XGBoost model demonstrates the most comprehensive performance in the modeling and inversion stages, and its $R_{cv}^2$, $RMS{E}_{cv}$, and $MA{E}_{cv}$ are 0.81, 2.76, and 2.30, respectively; (2) The IRIV-XGBoost model was used to calculate the SPAD value of each pixel of pepper leaves, and to subsequently invert the chlorophyll distribution map of pepper leaves at different leaf positions, which can provide support for the intuitive monitoring of crop growth and lay the foundation for the development of hyperspectral field dynamic monitoring sensors.

The sustainable development of water resources is always emphasized in China, and a set of perfect standards for the division of inland water environment quality have been established to monitor water quality. However, most of the 24 indicators that determine the water quality level in the standards are non-optically active parameters. The weak optical characteristics make it difficult to find significant correlations between the single parameters and the remote sensing imagery. In addition, traditional on-site testing methods have been unable to meet the increasingly extensive water-quality monitoring requirements. Based on the above questions, it’s meaningful that the supervised classification process of a detail-preserving smoothing classifier based on conditional random field (CRF) and Landsat-8 data was proposed in the two study areas around Wuhan and Huangshi in Hubei Province. The random forest classifier was selected to model the association potential of the CRF. The results (the first study area: OA = 89.50%, Kappa = 0.841; the second study area: OA = 90.35%, Kappa = 0.868) showed that the water-quality monitoring based on CRF model is feasible, and this approach can provide a reference for water-quality mapping of inland lakes. In the future, it may only require a small amount of on-site sampling to achieve the identification of the water quality levels of inland lakes across a large area of China.