Abstract
On rugged slopes overlooking the Douro River we find the Alto Douro Wine Region in Portugal, populated by plantations in schist lands of difficult access and mostly manual work. The combined features of this region are a source of motivation to explore remote sensing techniques associated with artificial intelligence. In this paper, a preliminary approach for terrace vineyards detection is presented. This is a key-enabling task towards the achievement of important goals such as multi-temporal crop evaluation and cultures characterization. The proposed methodology consists in the application of a deep learning model (U-net) to detect the terrace vineyards using satellite images dataset acquired with Google Earth Pro. The proposed methodology showed very promising detection capabilities.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Efficient detection and monitoring procedures of invasive plant species are required. It is of crucial importance to deal with such plants in aquatic ecosystems, since they can affect biodiversity and, ultimately, ecosystem function and services. In this study, it is intended to detect water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) using multispectral data with different spatial resolutions. For this purpose, high-resolution data (<0.1 m) acquired from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and coarse-resolution data (10 m) from Sentinel-2 MSI were used. Three areas with a high incidence of water hyacinth located in the Lower Mondego region (Portugal) were surveyed. Different classifiers were used to perform a pixel-based detection of this invasive species in both datasets. From the different classifiers used, the results were achieved by the random forest classifiers stand-out (overall accuracy (OA): 0.94). On the other hand, support vector machine performed worst (OA: 0.87), followed by Gaussian naive Bayes (OA: 0.88), k-nearest neighbours (OA: 0.90), and artificial neural networks (OA: 0.91). The higher spatial resolution from UAV-based data enabled us to detect small amounts of water hyacinth, which could not be detected in Sentinel-2 data. However, and despite the coarser resolution, satellite data analysis enabled us to identify water hyacinth coverage, compared well with a UAV-based survey. Combining both datasets and even considering the different resolutions, it was possible to observe the temporal and spatial evolution of water hyacinth. This approach proved to be an effective way to assess the effects of the mitigation/control measures taken in the study areas. Thus, this approach can be applied to detect invasive species in aquatic environments and to monitor their changes over time.

Abstract
Modelling of material appearance from reflectance measurements has become increasingly prevalent due to the development of novel methodologies in Computer Graphics. In the last few years, some advances have been made in measuring the light-material interactions, by employing goniometers/reflectometers under specific laboratory's constraints. A wide range of applications benefit from data-driven appearance modelling techniques and material databases to create photorealistic scenarios and physically based simulations. However, important limitations arise from the current material scanning process, mostly related to the high diversity of existing materials in the real-world, the tedious process for material scanning and the spectral characterisation behaviour. Consequently, new approaches are required both for the automatic material acquisition process and for the generation of measured material databases. In this study, a novel approach for material appearance acquisition using hyperspectral data is proposed. A dense 3D point cloud filled with spectral data was generated from the images obtained by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with an RGB camera and a hyperspectral sensor. The observed hyperspectral signatures were used to recognise natural and artificial materials in the 3D point cloud according to spectral similarity. Then, a parametrisation of Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) was carried out by sampling the BRDF space for each material. Consequently, each material is characterised by multiple samples with different incoming and outgoing angles. Finally, an analysis of BRDF sample completeness is performed considering four sunlight positions and 16x16 resolution for each material. The results demonstrated the capability of the used technology and the effectiveness of our method to be used in applications such as spectral rendering and real-word material acquisition and classification. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract
Multi-temporal InSAR (MT- InSAR) observations, which enable deformation monitoring at an unprecedented scale, are usually affected by decorrelation and other noise inducing factors. Such observations (PS - Persistent scatterers), are usually in the order of several thousand, making their respective evaluation frequently computationally expensive. In the present study, we propose an approach for the detection of MT-InSAR outlying observations through the implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) classification models. For each PS, the corresponding MT-InSAR parameters and the respective parameters of the neighboring scatterers and its relative position are considered. Tests in two independent datasets, covering the regions of Bratislava city and the suburbs of Prievidza, Slovakia, were performed. The results showed that such models offer a robust and reduced computation time method for the evaluation of MT-InSAR outlying observations. However, the applicability of these models is limited by the deformation pattern in which such models were trained.