Disaster mapping is a critical task that often requires on-site experts and is time-consuming. To address this, a comprehensive framework is presented for fast and accurate recognition of disasters using machine learning, termed DisasterNets. It consists of two stages, space granulation and attribute granulation. The space granulation stage leverages supervised/semi-supervised learning, unsupervised change detection, and domain adaptation with/without source data techniques to handle different disaster mapping scenarios. Furthermore, the disaster database with the corresponding geographic information field properties is built by using the attribute granulation stage. The framework is applied to earthquake-triggered landslide mapping and large-scale flood mapping. The results demonstrate a competitive performance for high-precision, high-efficiency, and cross-scene recognition of disasters. To bridge the gap between disaster mapping and machine learning communities, we will provide an openly accessible tool based on DisasterNets. The framework and tool will be available at https://github.com/HydroPML/DisasterNets.

The health impacts of extreme heat intensify, increasing deaths and illnesses. As the most direct and effective way to cool down, urban green space (UGS) has gained great attention. However, due to the limited availability of UGS resources, the critical point is how to increase the cooling effect of UGS in response to the context of climate warming. Since the different spatial distribution of UGS affects its ability to alleviate the urban heat island (UHI) effect, improving the equity of UGS will significantly alter the spatial distribution of UGS. In this study, we analyze UGS and land surface temperature (LST) data from two Chinese megacities between 2000 and 2020 to investigate the potential of enhancing equitable UGS distribution in mitigating the UHI. Our findings indicate that addressing inequities in UGS distribution contributes modestly to UHI mitigation, shedding new light on enhancing the cooling effect of UGS.

Change detection (CD) by comparing two bi-temporal images is a crucial task in remote sensing. With the advantages of requiring no cumbersome labeled change information, unsupervised CD has attracted extensive attention in the community. However, existing unsupervised CD approaches rarely consider the seasonal and style differences incurred by the illumination and atmospheric conditions in multi-temporal images. To this end, we propose a change detection with domain shift setting for remote sensing images. Furthermore, we present a novel unsupervised CD method using a light-weight transformer, called UCDFormer. Specifically, a transformer-driven image translation composed of a light-weight transformer and a domain-specific affinity weight is first proposed to mitigate domain shift between two images with real-time efficiency. After image translation, we can generate the difference map between the translated before-event image and the original after-event image. Then, a novel reliable pixel extraction module is proposed to select significantly changed/unchanged pixel positions by fusing the pseudo change maps of fuzzy c-means clustering and adaptive threshold. Finally, a binary change map is obtained based on these selected pixel pairs and a binary classifier. Experimental results on different unsupervised CD tasks with seasonal and style changes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed UCDFormer. For example, compared with several other related methods, UCDFormer improves performance on the Kappa coefficient by more than 12%. In addition, UCDFormer achieves excellent performance for earthquake-induced landslide detection when considering large-scale applications. The code is available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/UCDFormer.

The domain adaptation (DA) approaches available to date are usually not well suited for practical DA scenarios of remote sensing image classification since these methods (such as unsupervised DA) rely on rich prior knowledge about the relationship between label sets of source and target domains, and source data are often not accessible due to privacy or confidentiality issues. To this end, we propose a practical universal DA (UniDA) setting for remote sensing image scene classification that requires no prior knowledge on the label sets. Furthermore, a novel UniDA method without source data is proposed for cases when the source data are unavailable. The architecture of the model is divided into two parts: the source data generation stage and the model adaptation stage. The first stage estimates the conditional distribution of source data from the pretrained model using the knowledge of class separability in the source domain and then synthesizes the source data. With this synthetic source data in hand, it becomes a UniDA task to classify a target sample correctly if it belongs to any category in the source label set or mark it as “unknown” otherwise. In the second stage, a novel transferable weight that distinguishes the shared and private label sets in each domain promotes the adaptation in the automatically discovered shared label set and recognizes the “unknown” samples successfully. Empirical results show that the proposed model is effective and practical for remote sensing image scene classification, regardless of whether the source data are available or not. The code is available athttps://github.com/zhu-xlab/UniDA.

Existing domain adaptation (DA) approaches are usually not well suited for practical DA scenarios of remote sensing image classification, since these methods (such as unsupervised DA) rely on rich prior knowledge about the relationship between label sets of source and target domains, and source data are usually not accessible in many cases due to the privacy or confidentiality issues. To this end, we propose a novel source data generation-based universal domain adaptation (SDG-UniDA) model, which includes two parts, i.e., the stage of source data generation and the stage of model adaptation. The first stage is to estimate the conditional distribution of source data from the pre-trained model using the knowledge of class-separability in the source domain and then to synthesize the source data. With this synthetic source data in hand, it becomes a universal DA task that requires no prior knowledge on the label sets. A novel transferable weight is proposed to distinguish the shared and private label sets to each domain, thereby promoting the adaptation in the automatically discovered shared label set and recognizing the "unknown" samples successfully. Empirical results show that SDG-UniDA is effective and practical in this challenging setting for remote sensing image scene classification.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for the semantic segmentation of remote sensing images is challenging since the same class of objects may have different spectra while the different class of objects may have the same spectrum. To address this issue, we propose a class-aware generative adversarial network (CaGAN) for UDA semantic segmentation of multisource remote sensing images, which explicitly models the discrepancies of intraclass and the interclass between the source domain images with labels and the target domain images without labels. Specifically, first, to enhance the global domain alignment (GDA), we propose a transferable attention alignment (TAA) procedure to add more fine-grained features into the adversarial learning framework. Then, we propose a novel class-aware domain alignment (CDA) approach in semantic segmentation. CDA mainly includes two parts: the first one is adaptive category selection, which is to alleviate the class imbalance and select the reliable per-category centers in the source and target domains; the second one is adaptive category alignment, which is to model the intraclass compactness and interclass separability from source-only, target-only, and joint source and target images. Finally, the CDA plays as a penalty of GDA to train GaGAN in an alternating and iterative manner. Experiments on domain adaptation of space to space, spectrum to spectrum, both space-to-space and spectrum-to-spectrum data sets demonstrate that CaGAN outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods, which may serve as a starting point and baseline for the comprehensive applications of semantic segmentation in cross-space and cross-spectrum remote sensing images.