Chiara Zarro

Mariapia Rita Iandolo, Francesca Razzano, Chiara Zarro et al.

The aim of this work is to perform a multitemporal analysis using the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform for the detection of changes in urban areas using optical data and specific machine learning (ML) algorithms. As a case study, Cairo City has been identified, in Egypt country, as one of the five most populous megacities of the last decade in the world. Classification and change detection analysis of the region of interest (ROI) have been carried out from July 2013 to July 2021. Results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method in identifying changed and unchanged urban areas over the selected period. Furthermore, this work aims to evidence the growing significance of GEE as an efficient cloud-based solution for managing large quantities of satellite data.

Francesca Razzano, Mariapia Rita Iandolo, Chiara Zarro et al.

In this study, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical data are both considered for Earth surface classification. Specifically, the integration of Sentinel-1 (S-1) and Sentinel-2 (S-2) data is carried out through supervised Machine Learning (ML) algorithms implemented on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform for the classification of a particular region of interest. Achieved results demonstrate how in this case radar and optical remote detection provide complementary information, benefiting surface cover classification and generally leading to increased mapping accuracy. In addition, this paper works in the direction of proving the emerging role of GEE as an effective cloud-based tool for handling large amounts of satellite data.

R. Ganesh Babu, K. Uma Maheswari, C. Zarro et al.

Land use and land cover (LULC) classification using remote sensing imagery plays a vital role in many environment modeling and land use inventories. In this study, a hybrid feature optimization algorithm along with a deep learning classifier is proposed to improve the performance of LULC classification, helping to predict wildlife habitat, deteriorating environmental quality, haphazard, etc. LULC classification is assessed using Sat 4, Sat 6 and Eurosat datasets. After the selection of remote sensing images, normalization and histogram equalization methods are used to improve the quality of the images. Then, a hybrid optimization is accomplished by using the Local Gabor Binary Pattern Histogram Sequence (LGBPHS), the Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and Haralick texture features, for the feature extraction from the selected images. The benefits of this hybrid optimization are a high discriminative power and invariance to color and grayscale images. Next, a Human Group based Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to select the optimal features, whose benefits are fast convergence rate and easy to implement. After selecting the optimal feature values, a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network is utilized to classify the LULC classes. Experimental results showed that the Human Group based PSO algorithm with a LSTM classifier effectively well differentiates the land use and land cover classes in terms of classification accuracy, recall and precision. An improvement of 2.56% in accuracy is achieved compared to the existing models GoogleNet, VGG, AlexNet, ConvNet, when the proposed method is applied.