Trees are the key components of urban vegetation in cities. The timely and accurate identification of existing urban tree species with their location is the most important task for improving air, water, and land quality; reducing carbon accumulation; mitigating urban heat island effects; and protecting soil and water balance. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is frequently used for extracting high-resolution structural information regarding tree objects. LiDAR systems are a cost-effective alternative to the traditional ways of identifying tree species, such as field surveys and aerial photograph interpretation. The aim of this work was to assess the usage of machine learning algorithms for classifying the deciduous (broadleaf) and coniferous tree species from 3D raw LiDAR data on the Davutpasa Campus of Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. First, ground, building, and low, medium, and high vegetation classes were acquired from raw LiDAR data using a hierarchical-rule-based classification method. Next, individual tree crowns were segmented using a mean shift clustering algorithm from high vegetation points. A total of 25 spatial- and intensity-based features were utilized for support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifiers to discriminate deciduous and coniferous tree species in the urban area. The machine learning-based classification’s overall accuracies were 80%, 83.75%, and 73.75% for the SVM, RF, and MLP classifiers, respectively, in split 70/30 (training/testing). The SVM and RF algorithms generally gave better classification results than the MLP algorithm for identifying the urban tree species.

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The Use of Machine Learning Algorithms in Urban Tree Species Classification

Land use classification of high resolution remote sensing images using an encoder based modified GAN architecture

Every biological system on the planet is severely impacted by environmental change, and its primary driver is deforestation. Meanwhile, quantitative analysis of changes in Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) is one of the prominent ways to manage and understand land transformation; thus, it is essential to inspect the performance of various techniques for LULC mapping to recognize the better classifier to more applications of earth observation. This article develops a Tunicate Swarm Algorithm with Deep Learning Enabled Land Use and Land Cover Change Detection (TSADL-LULCCD) technique in Nallamalla Forest, India. The presented TSADL-LULCCD technique mainly focuses on the identification and classification of land use in the Nallamalla forest using LANDSAT images. To accomplish this, the presented TSADL-LULCCD technique employs a dense EfficientNet model for feature extraction. In addition, the Adam optimizer is applied for the optimal hyper parameter tuning of the dense EfficientNet approach. For land cover classification, the TSADL-LULCCD technique exploits the Deep Belief Network (DBN) approach. To tune the hyper parameters related to the DBN system, the TSA is used. The experimental validation of the TSADL-LULCCD algorithm is tested on LANDSAT-7-based Nallamalla region images. The experimental results stated that the TSADL-LULCCD technique exhibits better performance over other existing models in terms of different evaluation measures.

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Tunicate Swarm Algorithm with Deep Learning Based Land Use and Cover Change Detection in Nallamalla Forest India

Detection of melanoma with hybrid learning method by removing hair from dermoscopic images using image processing techniques and wavelet transform

• Transfer learning approach on pre-trained DCNN models for the WANG dataset. • Using word2cev for creating an embedding vector followed by a combination of DSSM and LSTM to reduce the size of a word vector and using these new word vectors to assign five synonyms for each label or keyword for an image to improve classification accuracy. • Fusion of auto extracted features from pre-trained models and word to vector features obtained from word2vec, DSSM, and LSTM for improved content-based image classification (CBIC). In today's age, massive image data is generated rapidly. This influx has made labeling images tedious and, in turn, made it harder to retrieve images through searching algorithms that rely only on labels, keywords, or other meta-data in the images. Modern Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) techniques rely on the visual features within the image to return relevant results to a search query. Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) models made great strides in the last decade. This paper relies on these complex pre-trained models to extract visual features from images. The proposed work has used pre-trained models like VGG16, MobileNet, Inceptionv3, and Xception for this task. Some studies in the CBIR space also suggest increased accuracy when both visual and textual features are considered. This paper proposes a novel three-step process for obtaining textual features. Firstly, the proposed model receives keywords for each image using Google Cloud Vision API. Secondly, the proposed model replaces each keyword with a 300-dimensional embedding vector obtained using word2vec, trained on the Google News dataset. Finally, the proposed model trains a combination of the Deep Semantic Similarity Model (DSSM) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to reduce the 300-dimensional vector to a 64-dimensional vector. Using these new shortened word vectors, the proposed model computes the cosine similarity to replace each keyword of an image with five of its synonyms. Here, these additional steps increased the accuracy compared to simply using a word embedding technique. Finally, the proposed model combined the visual and textual feature vectors and observed that this feature set showed maximum classification accuracy of 98.33%, which is also compared with and found relatively better than other similar model results. 

Fusion of vectored text descriptors with auto extracted deep CNN features for improved image classification

Fusing deep convolutional neural network features with Thepade’s SBTC for land usage identification

In today’s digital times, the quality of video frames is ubiquitous, and the presence of shadows is undesirable in computer vision applications. Shadow suppression is of paramount significance in crucial application areas, especially in outdoor scene environments. The objects present in the environment occlude the light. Most of the work in literature focuses on single shadow regions in a frame or an image. Different methods are proposed in the literature. This challenging area of shadows suppression is addressed with the proposed method, as a novel amalgamation, with Adaptive Gamma Weighted Correction and modified Exemplar based inpainting method. The paper discusses different single shadow scenarios and multiple distributed shadow regions. Across four datasets, and objective evaluation using three performance metrics, the obtained average Entropy of 7.032, ‘Blind Reference Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE)’ of 26.2031, and ‘No-Reference Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE)’ of 3.699 have demonstrated considerable results. 

Pablo Turco

Papers

Fusing deep convolutional neural network features with Thepade’s SBTC for land usage identification

Fusing deep convolutional neural network features with Thepade’s SBTC for land usage identification

Improved shadow suppression with amalgamation of AGWCD and exemplar based inpainting method