Publications

Wang, HY; Zhang, XY; Du, SH; Bai, LB; Liu, B (2022). Mapping Annual Urban Evolution Process (2001-2018) at 250 m: A normalized multi-objective deep learning regression. REMOTE SENSING OF ENVIRONMENT, 278, 113088.

Abstract
Global urbanization changes land cover patterns and affects the living environment of humans. However, urbanization and its evolution process, i.e., conversions among diverse land covers, are hard to measure, as existing land cover maps usually have low temporal resolutions; conversely, long-term and temporally dense land cover maps, such as vegetation-impervious-soil decomposition maps base on MODIS, ignore the important land cover of cropland in urban evolution process (UEP). To resolve the issue, this study suggests a novel model named time extended non-crop vegetation-impervious-cropland (Time V-I-C) to represent and quantify different stages of UEP; then, a normalized multi-objective T-ConvLSTM (NMT) method is proposed to unmix cropland, non-crop vegetation, and impervious based on the intra-annual remotely-sensed time series, and obtain their fractions in each pixel for generating UEP maps. Consequently, UEP maps from 2001 to 2018 are generated for two Chinese urban agglomerations, i.e., Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Yangtze River Delta urban agglomerations. The mapping results have high accuracies with a small standard error of regression (SER) of 13.1%, small root mean square error (RMSE) of 12.6%, and small mean absolute error (MAE) of 8.4%, and the maps reveal the different UEP in the two urban agglomerations. Therefore, this study provides a new idea for expressing UEP and contributes to a wide range of urbanization studies and sustainable city development.

DOI:
10.1016/j.rse.2022.113088

ISSN:
1879-0704