Masoud Mahdianpari

C-CORE and Memorial University of Newfoundland · Electrical Engineering

Abstract Wetlands are important ecosystems around the world, although they are degraded due both to anthropogenic and natural process. Newfoundland is among the richest Canadian province in terms of different wetland classes. Herbaceous wetlands cover extensive areas of the Avalon Peninsula, which are the habitat of a number of animal and plant spe...

Wetlands provide a wide variety of environmental services globally and detailed wetland inventory maps are always necessary to determine the conservation strategies and effectively monitor these productive ecosystems. During the last two decades, satellite remote sensing data have been extensively used for wetland mapping and monitoring worldwide....

Despite recent advances of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in various computer vision tasks, their potential for classification of multispectral remote sensing images has not been thoroughly explored. In particular, the applications of deep CNNs using optical remote sensing data have focused on the classification of very high-resolution a...

Despite recent research into the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technique for wetland mapping worldwide, its capability has not yet been thoroughly investigated for Canadian wetland ecosystems. Accordingly, this study statistically analysed interferometric coherence and SAR backscatter variation in a study area located on the Aval...

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) compact polarimetry (CP) systems are of great interest for large area monitoring because of their ability to acquire data in a wider swath compared to full polarimetry (FP) systems and a significant improvement in information content compared to single or dual polarimetry (DP) sensors. In this study, we compared the p...

In the present study, the iceberg drafts and iceberg-seabed interaction process were simulated using the random forest regression (RFR)algorithm for the first time. Initially, utilizing the parameters governing the iceberg drafts and the iceberg-seabed interaction process in the sandy seabed, a set of RFR models were developed. To train and test th...

Nearly one-fifth of the Earth’s undiscovered hydrocarbons are reserved in the Arctic area whereas, the recent offshore oil and gas loading equipment, e.g., subsea pipelines, wellheads, and communication cables, developed in the Arctic waters has led to a considerable awareness of the iceberg draft prediction. The iceberg tip would gouge the ocean f...

Precise estimation of the iceberg draft may significantly reduce the collision risk of deep keel icebergs with the offshore facilities comprising the submarine pipelines, wellheads, communication cables, and hydrocarbon loading equipment crossing the Arctic shallow waters. As such, in this study, the iceberg drafts were simulated using a self-adapt...

Detailed wetland inventories and information about the spatial arrangement and the extent of wetland types across the Earth’s surface are crucially important for resource assessment and sustainable management. In addition, it is crucial to update these inventories due to the highly dynamic characteristics of the wetlands. Remote sensing technologie...

Recent offshore oil and gas loading facilities developed in the Arctic area have led to a considerable awareness of the iceberg draft approximation, where deep keel icebergs may gouge the ocean floor, and these submarine infrastructures would be damaged in the shallower waters. Developing reliable solutions to estimate the iceberg draft requires a...

The classifying of hyperspectral images (HSI) is a difficult task given the high dimensionality of the space, the huge number of spectral bands, and the small number of labeled data. As such, we offer a unique hyperspectral image classification methodology to address these issues based on sophisticated Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) algorithms. In th...

Mapping potential wetlands provides a promising approach to get such information rapidly, and thus is of great significance to understanding ecosystem sustainability and support wetland conservation and restoration. This study proposed a new processing pipeline to map potential wetlands in the Yangtze River Basin, the largest basin in China, by com...

An increasing availability of remote sensing data in the era of geo big-data makes producing well-represented, reliable training data to be more challenging and requires an excessive amount of human labor. In addition, the rapid increase in graphics processing unit (GPU) processing power has enabled the development of advanced deep learning (DL) al...

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images contain useful information, which can lead to extensive land cover interpretation and a variety of output products. In contrast to optical imagery, there are several challenges in extracting beneficial features from PolSAR data. Deep learning (DL) methods can provide solutions to address PolSAR...

Wetlands have long been recognized among the most critical ecosystems globally, yet their numbers quickly diminish due to human activities and climate change. Thus, large-scale wetland monitoring is essential to provide efficient spatial and temporal insights for resource management and conservation plans. However, the main challenge is the lack of...

Despite their importance to ecosystem services, wetlands are threatened by pollution and development. Over the last few decades, a growing number of wetland studies employed remote sensing (RS) to scientifically monitor the status of wetlands and support their sustainability. Considering the rapid evolution of wetland studies and significant progre...

Climate change and population growth risk the world’s food supply. Annual crop yield production is one of the most crucial components of the global food supply. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has stressed global food security, production, and supply chains. Using biomass estimation as a reliable yield indicator, space-based monitoring of crops can...

Climate change-driven forces and anthropogenic interventions have led to considerable changes in coastal zones and shoreline positions, resulting in coastal erosion or sedimentation. Shoreline change detection through cost-effective methods and easy-access data plays a key role in coastal management, where other effective parameters such as land-us...

Many ecosystems, particularly wetlands, are significantly degraded or lost as a result of climate change and anthropogenic activities. Simultaneously, developments in machine learning, particularly deep learning methods, have greatly improved wetland mapping, which is a critical step in ecosystem monitoring. Yet, present deep and very deep models n...

Iceberg-seabed interaction that threatens subsea pipelines and structures is a challenging and costly engineering design aspect of Arctic offshore infrastructures. In this study, the sub-gouge soil deformation in the sand along with the keel reaction forces was simulated using Random Forest (RF) as a strong machine learning (ML) model and compared...

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown promising results in classifying complex remote sensing scenery, particularly in the classification of wetlands. State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms, on the other hand, are transformers. In this paper, we illustrate the effectiveness of the cutting-edge Swin Transformer for t...

Recently, deep learning algorithms, specifically convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have played an important role in remote sensing image classification, including wetland mapping. However, one limitation of deep CNN for classification is its requirement for a great number of training samples. This limitation is particularly enhanced when the cl...

Wetlands are important ecosystems delivering goods and services for a number of important functions, including providing key habitats to many plants and animals, maintaining water quality and quantity (e.g., to control floods), offering food and recreational opportunities for humans, and acting as a carbon sink. They are also important components o...

Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) provides valuable information about the carbon cycle, carbon sink monitoring, and understanding of climate change factors. Remote sensing data coupled with machine learning models have been increasingly used for forest AGB estimation over local and regional extents. Landsat series provide a 50-year data archive, whi...

In Arctic offshore regions, the oil and gas hydrocarbons are transferred to the onshore basins through the subsea pipelines. However, the operational integrity of the subsea pipeline may be at risk of collision with traveling icebergs, which gouge the seabed in the Arctic shallow waters. Even though these sea bottom-founded structures are buried at...

Sea ice profoundly influences ocean circulation, the polar environment, biology, climate, and commercial activities. The rapidly changing sea ice environment and increased human activities in polar regions drive the demand for sea ice monitoring. Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been widely adopted for sea ice sensing due to its all-we...

Providing an accurate above-ground biomass (AGB) map is of paramount importance for carbon stock and climate change monitoring. The main objective of this study is to compare the performance of pixel-based and object-based approaches for AGB estimation of temperate forests in north-eastern of New York State. Second, the capabilities of optical, SAR...

Forest above-ground biomass (AGB) estimation provides valuable information about the carbon cycle. Thus, the overall goal of this paper is to present an approach to enhance the accuracy of the AGB estimation. The main objectives are to: 1) investigate the performance of remote sensing data sources, including airborne light detection and ranging (Li...

Monitoring freshwater quality is a global concern because of increasing harmful algal blooms (HABs). Therefore, it is important to detect HABs especially in small lakes as they hold great socioeconomic value. This study estimates the potential of using Sentinel-2 for estimating chlorophyll-a value in small inland lakes. In particular, this study us...

Shallow convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have successfully been used to classify polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imagery. However, one drawback of the existing deep CNN-based techniques is that the input PolSAR training data are often insufficient due to their need for a significant number of training data compared to shallow CNN...

Wetland is one of the most productive resources on earth, and it provides vital habitats for several unique species of flora and fauna. Over the last decade, mapping and monitoring wetlands by utilizing deep learning (DL) models and remote sensing data gained popularity due to the importance of wetland preservation. In general, DL-based methods hav...

Seasonal variations result in hydrophytes and undrained hydric soil changes in wetland areas, which lead to a dynamic environment that makes wetland classification challenging. This study aims to explore the applicability of multi-seasonal Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) texture-derived features for object-based wetland classification over l...

In wetland mapping, a lot of uncertainty is related to the task of selecting an appropriate classification approach. Although the individual models are available and well-established in the literature for the classification task, the combination approaches have become popular recently. Hence, selecting an appropriate method is challenging, whether...

The above-ground biomass (AGB) estimation monitoring provides a powerful tool for the assessment of carbon emission and sequestration. Using remote sensing technique is an environmentally friendly way of biomass estimation. Thus, this paper investigated optical (i.e. Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel-2), synthetic aperture radar (SAR) (global phased array...

Carbon sequestration coupled with flood mitigation and other functions of wetlands, such as water filtration, coastal protection, biodiversity, and providing recreational spots, make wetland mapping and monitoring important for different countries. Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing platform is becoming a very important tool for lots of envi...

Ice gouging is one of the major menaces to the subsea pipelines crossing the Arctic (e.g., Beaufort Sea) or the non-Arctic (e.g., Caspian Sea) shallow waters. Burial of the sea-bottom-founded infrastructures is regarded as a feasible method for protection of the subsea assets against the ice gouging threat. These pipelines are commonly embedded und...

Sea ice monitoring plays a vital role in secure navigation and offshore activities. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been widely used as an effective tool for sea ice remote sensing (e.g., ice type classification, concentration and thickness retrieval) for decades because it can collect data by day and night and in almost all weather conditions....

Due to anthropogenic and natural activities, the land surface continuously changes over time. The accurate and timely detection of changes is greatly important for environmental monitoring , resource management and planning activities. In this study, a novel deep learning-based change detection algorithm is proposed for bi-temporal polarimetric syn...

The use of machine learning algorithms to classify complex landscapes has been revolutionized by the introduction of deep learning techniques, particularly in remote sensing. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great success in the classification of complex high-dimensional remote sensing imagery, specifically in wetland classification....

Crop biophysical parameters, such as Leaf Area Index (LAI) and biomass, are essential for estimating crop productivity, yield modeling, and agronomic management. This study used several features extracted from multi-temporal Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and spectral vegetation indices extracted from Sentinel-2 optical data to estimate...

The emergence of deep learning techniques has revolutionized the use of machine learning algorithms to classify complicated environments, notably in remote sensing. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown considerable promise in classifying challenging high-dimensional remote sensing data, particularly in the classification of wetlands. Sta...

The Canadian RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) has passed its early operation phase with the performance evaluation being currently active. This evaluation aims to confirm that the innovative design of the mission’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) meets the expectations of intended users. In this study, we provide an overview of initial results o...

We propose a hybrid algorithm for despeckling the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images using the convolutional neural network (CNN) denoising and complex wavelet shrinkage. In particular, we perform the speckle reduction process in the complex wavelet domain. We first despeckled the approximation complex wavelet coefficients using the MUlti-channe...

Wetlands are endangered ecosystems that are required to be systematically monitored. Wetlands have significant contributions to the well-being of human-being, fauna, and fungi. They provide vital services, including water storage, carbon sequestration, food security, and protecting the shorelines from floods. Remote sensing is preferred over the ot...

Due to anthropogenic activities and climate change, many natural ecosystems, especially wetlands, are lost or changing at a rapid pace. For the last decade, there has been increasing attention towards developing new tools and methods for the mapping and classification of wetlands using remote sensing. At the same time, advances in artificial intell...

Given the key role wetlands play in climate regulation and shoreline stabilization, identifying their spatial distribution is essential for the management, restoration, and protection of these invaluable ecosystems. The increasing availability of high spatial and temporal resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing data cou...

In recent years, several powerful machine learning (ML) algorithms have been developed for image classification, especially those based on ensemble learning (EL). In particular, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) methods have attracted researchers’ attention in data science due to their superior resul...

Algae serves as a food source for a wide range of aquatic species; however, a high concentration of inorganic nutrients under favorable conditions can result in the development of harmful algal blooms (HABs). Many studies have addressed HAB detection and monitoring; however, no global scale meta-analysis has specifically explored remote sensing-bas...

While deep learning models have been extensively applied to land-use land-cover (LULC) problems, it is still a relatively new and emerging topic for separating and classifying wetland types. On the other hand, ensemble learning has demonstrated promising results in improving and boosting classification accuracy. Accordingly, this study aims to deve...

Wetlands are among the most important, yet in danger ecosystems and play a vital role for the well-being of humans as well as flora and fauna. Over the past few years, state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) tools have gained attention for wetland classification within the remote sensing community. However, the DL methods could have complex structure a...

Development of the Canadian Wetland Inventory Map (CWIM) has thus far proceeded over two generations, reporting the extent and location of bog, fen, swamp, marsh, and water wetlands across the country with increasing accuracy. Each generation of this training inventory has improved the previous results by including additional reference wetland data...

Marine debris is considered a threat to the inhabitants, as well as the marine environments. Accumulation of marine debris, besides climate change factors, including warming water, sea-level rise, and changes in oceans’ chemistry, are causing the potential collapse of the marine environment’s health. Due to the increase of marine debris, including...

Rising sea level is generally assumed and widely reported to be the significant driver of coastal erosion of most low-lying sandy beaches globally. However, there is limited data-driven evidence of this relationship due to the challenges in quantifying shoreline dynamics at the same temporal scale as sea-level records. Using a Google Earth Engine (...

Oil spills are one of the most hazardous disasters with significant short-and long-term effects on fragile marine ecosystems. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been considered an effective technology for mapping and monitoring oil spills in the marine environment, primarily thanks to its weather-, illumination-, and time-independent capabilities....

The Conne River watershed is dominated by wetlands that provide valuable ecosystem services, including contributing to the survivability and propagation of Atlantic salmon, an important subsistence species that has shown a dramatic decline over the past 30 years. To better understand and improve the management of the watershed, and in turn, the Atl...

Sustainable forest management is a critical topic which contributes to ecological, economical, and socio-cultural aspect of the environment. Providing accurate AGB maps is of paramount importance for sustainable forest management, carbon accounting, and climate change monitoring. The main goal of this study was to leverage the potential of two mach...

With uninterrupted space-based data collection since 1972, Landsat plays a key role in systematic monitoring of the Earth’s surface, enabled by an extensive and free, radiometrically consistent, global archive of imagery. Governments and international organizations rely on Landsat time series for monitoring and deriving a systematic understanding o...