Research on the forest structure classification is essential, as it plays an important role in assessing the vitality and diversity of vegetation. However, classifying forest structure involves in situ surveying, which requires considerable time and money, and cannot be conducted directly in some instances; also, the update cycle of the classification data is very late. To overcome these drawbacks, feasibility studies on mapping the forest vertical structure from aerial images using machine learning techniques were conducted. In this study, we investigated (1) the performance improvement of the forest structure classification, using a high-resolution LiDAR-derived digital surface model (DSM) acquired from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform and (2) the performance comparison of results obtained from the single-seasonal and two-seasonal data, using random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and support vector machine (SVM). For the performance comparison, the UAV optic and LiDAR data were divided into three cases: (1) only used autumn data, (2) only used winter data, and (3) used both autumn and winter data. From the results, the best model was XGBoost, and the F1 scores achieved using this method were approximately 0.92 in the autumn and winter cases. A remarkable improvement was achieved when both two-seasonal images were used. The F1 score improved by 35.3% from 0.68 to 0.92. This implies that (1) the seasonal variation in the forest vertical structure can be more important than the spatial resolution, and (2) the classification performance achieved from the two-seasonal UAV optic images and LiDAR-derived DSMs can reach 0.9 with the application of an optimal machine learning approach.

In recent years, the incidence of localized heavy rainfall has increased as abnormal weather events occur more frequently. In densely populated urban areas, this type of heavy rain can cause extreme landslide damage, so that it is necessary to estimate and analyze the susceptibility of future landslides. In this regard, deep learning (DL) methodologies have been used to identify areas prone to landslides recently. Therefore, in this study, DL methodologies, including a deep neural network (DNN), kernel-based DNN, and convolutional neural network (CNN) were used to identify areas where landslides could occur. As a detailed step for this purpose, landslide occurrence was first determined as landslide inventory through aerial photographs with comparative analysis using field survey data; a training set was built for model training through oversampling based on the landslide inventory. A total of 17 landslide influencing variables that influence the frequency of landslides by topography and geomorphology, as well as soil and forest variables, were selected to establish a landslide inventory. Then models were built using DNN, kernel-based DNN, and CNN models, and the susceptibility of landslides in the study area was determined. Model performance was evaluated through the average precision (AP) score and root mean square error (RMSE) for each of the three models. Finally, DNN, kernel-based DNN, and CNN models showed performances of 99.45%, 99.44%, and 99.41%, and RMSE values of 0.1694, 0.1806, and 0.1747, respectively. As a result, all three models showed similar performance, indicating excellent predictive ability of the models developed in this study. The information of landslides occurring in urban areas, which cause a great damage even with a small number of occurrences, can provide a basis for reference to the government and local authorities for urban landslide management.

It is well known that the polarization characteristics in X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image analysis can provide us with additional information for marine target classification and detection. Normally, dual-and single-polarized SAR images are acquired by SAR satellites, and then we must determine how accurate the marine mapping performance from dual-polarized (pol) images is versus the marine mapping performance from the single-pol images in a given machine learning model. The purpose of this study is to compare the performance of single- and dual-pol SAR image classification achieved by the support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and deep neural network (DNN) models. The test image is a TerraSAR-X dual-pol image acquired from the 2007 Kerch Strait oil spill event. For this, 824,026 pixels and 1,648,051 pixels were extracted from the image for the training and test, respectively, and sea, ship, oil, and land objects were classified from the image by using the three machine learning methods. The mean f1-scores of the SVM, RF, and DNN models resulting from the single-pol image were approximately 0.822, 0.882, and 0.889, respectively, and those from the dual-pol image were about 0.852, 0.908, and 0.898, respectively. The performance improvement achieved by dual-pol was about 3.6%, 2.9%, and 1% in SVM, RF, and DNN, respectively. The DNN model had the best performance (0.889) in the single-pol test while the RF model was best (0.908) in the dual-pol test. The performance improvement was approximately 2.1% and not noticeable. If the condition that dual-pol images have two-times lower spatial resolution versus single-pol images in the azimuth direction is considered, a small improvement may not be valuable. Therefore, the results show that the performance improvement by X-band dual-pol image may be not remarkable when classifying the sea, ships, oil spills, and sea and land surfaces.

Every vegetation colony has its own vertical structure. Forest vertical structure is considered as an important indicator of a forest’s diversity and vitality. The vertical structure of a forest has typically been investigated by field survey, which is the traditional method of forest inventory. However, this method is very time- and cost-consuming due to poor accessibility. Remote sensing data such as satellite imagery, aerial photography, and lidar data can be a viable alternative to the traditional field-based forestry survey. In this study, we classified forest vertical structures from red-green-blue (RGB) aerial orthophotos and lidar data using an artificial neural network (ANN), which is a powerful machine learning technique. The test site was Gongju province in South Korea, which contains single-, double-, and triple-layered forest structures. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by comparing the results with field survey data. The overall accuracy achieved was about 70%. It means that the proposed approach can classify the forest vertical structures from the aerial orthophotos and lidar data.

As the importance of forests has increased, continuously monitoring and managing information on forest ecology has become essential. The composition and distribution of tree species in forests are essential indicators of forest ecosystems. Several studies have been conducted to classify tree species using remote sensing data and machine learning algorithms because of the constraints of the traditional approach for classifying tree species in forests. In the machine learning approach, classification accuracy varies based on the characteristics and quantity of the study area data used. Thus, applying various classification models to achieve the most accurate classification results is necessary. In the literature, patch-based deep learning (DL) algorithms that use feature maps have shown superior classification results than point-based techniques. DL techniques substantially affect the performance of input data but gathering highly explanatory data is difficult in the study area. In this study, we analyzed (1) the accuracy of tree classification by convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based DL models with various structures of CNN feature extraction areas using a high-resolution LiDAR-derived digital surface model (DSM) acquired from a drone platform and (2) the impact of tree classification by creating input data via various geometric augmentation methods. For performance comparison, the drone optic and LiDAR data were separated into two groups according to the application of data augmentation, and the classification performance was compared using three CNN-based models for each group. The results demonstrated that Groups 1 and CNN-1, CNN-2, and CNN-3 were 0.74, 0.79, and 0.82 and 0.79, 0.80, and 0.84, respectively, and the best mode was CNN-3 in Group 2. The results imply that (1) when classifying tree species in the forest using high-resolution bi-seasonal drone optical images and LiDAR data, a model in which the number of filters of various sizes and filters gradually decreased demonstrated a superior classification performance of 0.95 for a single tree and 0.75 for two or more mixed species; (2) classification performance is enhanced during model learning by augmenting training data, especially for two or more mixed tree species.