Peter M Atkinson

• PhD
• Head of Faculty at Lancaster University

Subpixel mapping (SPM) addresses the widespread mixed pixel problem in remote sensing images by predicting the spatial distribution of land cover within mixed pixels. However, conventional pixel-based spectral unmixing, a key pre-processing step for SPM, neglects valuable spatial contextual information and struggles with spectral variability, ultim...

Temporally neighboring homologous images are crucial to provide auxiliary information for thick cloud removal. Due to the inherent satellite revisit period and frequent cloud obscuration, there is often a significant time interval between the target cloudy images and neighboring cloud-free homologous images, leading to potential land surface condit...

The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and Earth observation (EO) technologies has brought geoscience and remote sensing into an era of unparalleled capabilities. AI’s transformative impact on data analysis, particularly derived from EO platforms, holds great promise in addressing global challenges, such as environmental monitoring, disast...

Semantic change detection (SCD) involves the simultaneous extraction of changed regions and their corresponding semantic classifications (pre- and post-change) in remote sensing imagery (RSI). Despite recent advancements in Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), the Fast Segment Anything Model has demonstrated insufficient performance in SCD. In this pap...

The irreversible trend for global warming underscores the necessity for accurate monitoring and analysis of atmospheric carbon dynamics on a global scale. Carbon satellites hold significant potential for atmospheric CO2 monitoring. However, existing studies on global CO2 are constrained by coarse resolution (ranging from 0.25° to 2°) and limited sp...

While it is crucial to monitor the spatio-temporal dynamics of forests at the sub-pixel scale, most available nonlinear methods are used to predict forest cover fraction maps only at the acquisition time of the training samples and are, thus, unable to estimate time-series forest cover fraction beyond the acquisition time. Based on MODIS NDVI, VCF...

The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and Earth observation (EO) technologies has brought geoscience and remote sensing into an era of unparalleled capabilities. AI's transformative impact on data analysis, particularly derived from EO platforms, holds great promise in addressing global challenges such as environmental monitoring, disaste...

Timely and large-area monitoring of terrestrial water bodies using remote sensing data is essential to protect water resource security for humans and ecosystems. Although efforts have been made to monitor inter-monthly water bodies at the regional, continental and global scales, surface open water bodies may experience rapid changes within a short...

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are employed extensively in remote sensing due to their capacity to capture intricate features from a broad range of object patterns, irrespective of object size, shape or color. These networks excel at extracting high-frequency spectral information such as angles, edges and outlines. The classification boundary...

Due to its capacity to recognize detailed spectral differences, hyperspectral data have been extensively used for precise Land Use Land Cover (LULC) mapping. However, recent multi-modal methods have shown their superior classification performance over the algorithms that use single data sets. On the other hand, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)...

Landsat surface temperature (LST) is an important physical quantity for global climate change monitoring. Over the past decades, several LST products have been produced by satellite thermal infrared (TIR) bands or land surface models (LSMs). Recent research has increased the spatio-temporal resolution of LST products to 2 km, hourly based on Geosta...

Soil moisture (SM) plays a significant role in many natural and anthropogenic systems. Thus, accurate assessment of changes in SM globally is of great value, including long-term historical assessment. The European Space Agency established the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) program to produce long time-series surface SM datasets starting from 1978...

In the past 20 years, improvements in night-time light (NTL) remote sensing have spurred a resurgence of interest in the mapping of human economic activity. Nevertheless, the full potential of NTL data for urban research is constrained by a relatively coarse spatial resolution and the blooming effect. Downscaling NTL data is a potential solution, a...

Multimodal image fusion has recently garnered increasing interest in the field of remote sensing. By leveraging the complementary information in different modalities, the fused results may be more favorable in characterizing objects of interest, thereby increasing the chance of a more comprehensive and accurate perception of the scene. Unfortunatel...

Subpixel mapping (SPM) can address the mixed pixel problem by producing land cover maps at a finer spatial resolution than the input images. The Hopfield neural network (HNN) method has shown great advantages in SPM and various extended versions have been developed recently. However, a longstanding issue in the HNN, especially in the multi-class sc...

Selective logging and smallholder clearing are the dominant drivers of tropical forest disturbances in Cameroon (CAM). However, they are difficult to monitor accurately by satellite remote sensing because openings in the canopy can be very small, the vegetation is generally fast-growing, and cloud cover is common. Norway's International Climate and...

Are developing cities catching up with developed cities over time or not? Lack of information on socioeconomic indicators, such as those relating to economic growth and wealth in the frame of the UNSDGs, has slowed efforts to monitor changes in socioeconomic status. This lack of information is due largely to reliance on ground surveys with patchy t...

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are models that are utilized extensively for the hierarchical extraction of features. Vision transformers (ViTs), through the use of a self-attention mechanism, have recently achieved superior modeling of global contextual information compared to CNNs. However, to realize their image classification strength, ViT...

The study explored the dependence of the spatio-temporal pattern of rainfall and its variability on the spatial distribution of forests in the central Indian landscape, which covers ~1 million km², includes five states, and supports a population of 329 million people. The monsoon rainfall is, thus, a crucial source of freshwater for these populatio...

Young forest age mapping at a fine spatial resolution is important for increasing the accuracy of estimating land–atmosphere carbon fluxes and guiding forest management practices. In recent decades, China has actively conducted afforestation and forest protection projects, thereby laying the foundation for the realization of carbon neutrality. Howe...

For mapping and monitoring socioeconomic activities in cities, night-time lights (NTL) satellite sensor images are used widely, measuring the light intensity during the night. However, the main challenge to mapping human activities in cities using such NTL satellite sensor images is their coarse spatial resolution. To address this drawback, spatial...

Measures of spatial association are important to reveal the spatial structures and patterns in geographical phenomena. They have utility for spatial interpolation, stochastic simulation, and causal inference, among others. Such measures are abundantly available for continuous spatial variables, whereas for categorical spatial variables they are les...

New satellite remote sensing and machine learning techniques offer untapped possibilities to monitor global biodiversity with unprecedented speed and precision. These efficiencies promise to reveal novel ecological insights at spatial scales which are germane to the management of populations and entire ecosystems. Here, we present a robust transfer...

Soil moisture (SM) plays a significant role in many natural and anthropogenic systems which are essential to supporting life on Earth. Thus, accurate measurement and assessment of changes in soil moisture globally is of great value, including long-term historical assessment. Since the on-board cycle and detailed parameters of disparate sensors are...

Land use and its management can play a vital role in carbon sequestration, but trade-offs may exist with other objectives including food security and nature recovery. Using an integrated model (the FABLE calculator), four pathways, co-created with colleagues at the Welsh Government, towards achieving climate and biodiversity targets in Wales were e...

Classification of objects from 3-D point clouds has become an increasingly relevant task across many computer-vision applications. However, few studies have investigated explainable methods. In this article, a new prototype-based and explainable classification method called eXplainable point cloud classifier (XPCC) is proposed. The XPCC method offe...

Young forest age mapping at a fine spatial resolution is important for increasing the accuracy of estimating land-atmosphere carbon fluxes and guiding forest management practices. In recent decades, China has actively conducted afforestation and forest protection projects, thereby, laying the foundation for the realization of carbon neutrality. How...

The thermal infrared (TIR) band of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra/Aqua satellite can provide daily, 1 km land surface temperature (LST) observations. However, due to the influence of cloud contamination, spatial gaps are common in the LST product, restricting its application greatly at the regional scale...

Remote sensing satellites provide an effective solution for obtaining large-scale precipitation data. However, the spatial resolution of satellite-based precipitation products is often too coarse for hydrological applications at the regional scale. As a solution, spatial downscaling has been increasingly investigated to increase the spatial resolut...

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection is a challenging task due to inherent speckle noise, imbalanced class occurrence and the requirement for discriminative feature learning. The traditional handcrafted feature extraction and current convolution-based deep learning techniques have some advantages, but suffer from being limited to n...

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an indispensable source of data for mapping and monitoring flood hazards, thanks to its ability to image the Earth’s surface in all weather conditions and at all times. Through cloud computing platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE), SAR imagery can be used in near-real time for rapid flood mapping. This has fa...

Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) is a neglected tropical disease that has not received much attention in Zambia and most of the countries in which it occurs. In this study, we assessed the adequacy of the healthcare delivery system in diagnosis and management of rHAT cases, the environmental factors associated with transmission, the population a...

In order to extract useful geospatial information, cartographers are constantly challenged to respond to new sources and types of spatial data, such as satellite remote sensing imagery. Many different satellite remote sensing systems monitor the surface of the Earth, but only a small number of them are suitable for mapping or are even specifically...

Remotely sensed measurements of nocturnal lighting from the Visible Infrared Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite sensor offer a unique opportunity to track anthropogenic activities from space. This has opened the door to a multitude of new applications, such as monitoring urban expansion, estimating population growth and GDP, and tracking disasters...

China implemented a stringent Air Clean Plan (ACP) since 2013 to address environmental and health risks caused by ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5). However, the policy effectiveness of ACP and co-benefits of carbon mitigation measures to environment and health are still largely unknown. Using satellite-based PM2.5 products produced in our pr...

Spatio-temporal subpixel mapping (STSPM) has shown great potential for monitoring land surfaces, by generating land cover maps with both fine spatial and temporal resolutions. Selecting cloud-free fine spatial resolution images as ancillary data for STSPM can ensure that the temporal dependence term is measured for all subpixels, as in all current...

Accurate crop distribution mapping is required for crop yield prediction and field management. Due to rapid progress in remote sensing technology, fine spatial resolution (FSR) remotely sensed imagery now offers great opportunities for mapping crop types in great detail. However, within-class variance can hamper attempts to discriminate crop classe...

Soil moisture, a crucial property for Earth surface research, has been focused widely in various studies. The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) global products at 36 km and 9 km (called P36 and AP9 in this research) have been published from April 2015. However, the 9 km AP9 product was retrieved from the active radar and L-band passive radiometer...

Semantic segmentation of remotely sensed urban scene images is required in a wide range of practical applications , such as land cover mapping, urban change detection, environmental protection, and economic assessment. Driven by rapid developments in deep learning technologies, the convolutional neural network (CNN) has dominated semantic segmentat...

Soil moisture (SM) plays a significant role in many natural and anthropogenic systems which are essential to supporting life on Earth. Thus, accurate measurement and assessment of changes in soil moisture globally is of great value, including long-term historical assessment. Since the on-board cycle and detailed parameters of disparate sensors are...

Haze contamination is a very common issue in remote sensing images, which inevitably limits data usability and further applications. Several methods have been developed for haze removal, which is an ill-posed problem. However, most of these methods involve various strong assumptions coupled with manually-determined parameters, which limit their gen...

Assessment and quantitative description of river morphology using widely recognized river planview measures (e.g., length, width and sinuosity of channels, bifurcation angles and island shape) for multichannel rivers are regarded as fundamental parts of the toolkit of geomorphologists and river engineers. However, conventional assessment methods in...

Continuous monitoring of water bodies is critical for a range of applications including water resource management, natural hazard assessment and climate change analysis. GOES-16 geostationary satellite Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) imagery has a very fine (per 10 minutes) temporal resolution, which is essential for frequent monitoring of water bod...

In recent years, socioeconomic transformation and social modernisation in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have led to tremendous changes in lifestyle and, subsequently, expansion of urban settlements. This accelerated growth is pronounced not only across vegetated coasts, plains, and mountains, but also in desert cities. Nevertheless, spa...

Migrants are among the groups most vulnerable to infection with viruses due to the social and economic conditions in which they live. Therefore, spatial modeling of virus transmission among migrants is important for controlling and containing the COVID-19 pandemic. This research focused on modeling spatial associations between COVID-19 incidence ra...

Information extraction is a key activity for remote sensing images. A common distinction exists between knowledge-driven and data-driven methods. Knowledge-driven methods have advanced reasoning ability and interpretability, but have difficulty in handling complicated tasks since prior knowledge is usually limited when facing the highly complex spa...

Remote sensing images play a significant role in global land cover monitoring. However, due to the influence of cloud contamination, optical remote sensing images inevitably contain a large number of missing data, which severely limits their applicability. Existing cloud removal methods generally use only the effective information from a single ban...

This paper summarizes the development and application of spatial statistical models in satellite optical remote sensing. The paper focuses on the development of a conceptual model that includes the measurement and sampling processes inherent in remote sensing. We organized this paper into five main sections: introducing the basis of remote sensing,...

COVID-19 has impacted the health and livelihoods of billions of people since it emerged in 2019. Vaccination for COVID-19 is a critical intervention that is being rolled out globally to end the pandemic. Understanding the spatial inequalities in vaccination coverage and access to vaccination centres is important for planning this intervention natio...

Mixed pixels are a ubiquitous problem in remote sensing images. Spectral unmixing has been used widely for mixed pixel analysis. However, up to now, most spectral unmixing methods require endmembers and cannot consider fully intraclass spectral variation. The recently proposed spatiotemporal spectral unmixing (STSU) method copes with the aforementi...

Assigning geospatial objects with specific categories at the pixel level is a fundamental task in remote sensing image analysis. Along with the rapid development of sensor technologies, remotely sensed images can be captured at multiple spatial resolutions (MSR) with information content manifested at different scales. Extracting information from th...

Subpixel mapping (SPM) is a technique to tackle the mixed pixel problem and produce land cover and land use (LCLU) maps at a finer spatial resolution than the original coarse data. However, uncertainty exists unavoidably in SPM, which is an ill-posed downscaling problem. Spatio-temporal SPM methods have been proposed to deal with this uncertainty,...

Understanding the spatio-temporal pattern of natural vegetation helps decoding the responses to climate change and interpretation on forest resilience. Satellite remote sensing based data products, by virtue of their synoptic and repetitive coverage, offer to study the correlation and lag effects of rainfall on forest growth in a relatively longer...

Remote sensing scene classification plays a critical role in a wide range of real-world applications. Technically, however, scene classification is an extremely challenging task due to the huge complexity in remotely sensed scenes, and the difficulty in acquiring labelled data for model training such as supervised deep learning. To tackle these iss...

Spatiotemporal fusion is a technique applied to create images with both fine spatial and temporal resolutions by blending images with different spatial and temporal resolutions. Spatial unmixing (SU) is a widely used approach for spatiotemporal fusion, which requires only the minimum number of input images. However, ignorance of spatial variation i...

Optical earth observation satellite sensors often provide a coarse spatial resolution (CR) multispectral (MS) image together with a fine spatial resolution (FR) panchromatic (PAN) image. Pansharpening is a technique applied to such satellite sensor images to generate an FR MS image by injecting spatial detail taken from the FR PAN image while simul...

The agricultural landscape can be interpreted at different semantic levels, such as fine low-level crop (LLC) classes (e.g., Wheat, Almond, and Alfalfa) and broad high-level crop (HLC) classes (e.g., Winter crops, Tree crops, and Forage). The LLC and HLC are hierarchically correlated with each other, but such intrinsically hierarchical relationship...

Sentinel-3 is a newly launched satellite implemented by the European Space Agency (ESA) for global observation. The Ocean and Land Colour Imager (OLCI) sensor onboard Sentinel-3 provides 21 band images with a fine spectral resolution and is of great value for ocean, land and atmospheric monitoring. The two platforms (Sentinel-3A and -3B) can provid...

On May 31, 2003, the scan-line corrector (SLC) of Landsat 7 ETM+ failed permanently. The resulting ETM+ SLC-off images contain 22% un-scanned gap pixels, thus, severely limiting their utility. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to fill gaps in SLC-off images by identifying a new source of auxiliary or known image. Specifically, Sentinel-2 MSI i...

Crop production is a major source of food and livelihood for many people in arid and semi-arid (ASA) regions across the world. However, due to irregular climatic events, ASA regions are affected commonly by frequent droughts that can impact food production. In addition, ASA regions in the Middle East and Africa are often characterised by political...

Information on forest disturbance is crucial for tropical forest management and global carbon cycle analysis. The long-term collection of data from the Landsat missions provides some of the most valuable information for understanding the processes of global tropical forest disturbance. However, there are substantial uncertainties in the estimation...

Deep learning methods, especially convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods, have shown promising performance for hyperspectral image (HSI) change detection (CD). It is acknowledged widely that different spectral channels and spatial locations in input image patches may contribute differently to CD. However, they are treated equally in exist...

Semantic segmentation of remote sensing images plays an important role in a wide range of applications, including land resource management, biosphere monitoring, and urban planning. Although the accuracy of semantic segmentation in remote sensing images has been increased significantly by deep convolutional neural networks, several limitations exis...

This paper provides a brief analytical review of the current state-of-the-art in relation to the explainability of artificial intelligence in the context of recent advances in machine learning and deep learning. The paper starts with a brief historical introduction and a taxonomy, and formulates the main challenges in terms of explainability buildi...

This is the Matlab code of the STFMF (spatial-temporal fraction map fusion) algorithm. Please refer to the reference: Yihang Zhang, et al.“Spatial- temporal fraction map fusion with multi-scale remotely sensed images,”Remote Sensing of Environment, 2018, 213:162-181. Only for academic exchanges and scientific research, the code cannot be used...

The highly dynamic nature of agro-ecosystems in space and time usually leads to high intra-class variance and low inter-class separability in the fine spatial resolution (FSR) remotely sensed imagery. This makes traditional classifiers essentially relying on spectral information for crop mapping from FSR imagery an extremely challenging task. To mi...

Chronic kidney disease (CKD), a collective term for many causes of progressive renal failure, is increasing worldwide due to ageing, obesity and diabetes. However, these factors cannot explain the many environmental clusters of renal disease that are known to occur globally. This study uses data from the UK Renal Registry (UKRR) including CKD of un...

Global land cover (LC) changes threaten sustainability and yet we lack a comprehensive understanding of the gains and losses of LC types, including the magnitudes, locations and timings of transitions. We used a novel, fine-resolution and temporally consistent satellite-derived dataset covering the entire Earth annually from 1992 to 2018 to quantif...

Mixed pixels exist widely in remotely sensed images. To obtain more reliable land cover information than traditional hard classification, spectral unmixing methods have been developed to estimate the composition of the mixed pixels, in terms of the proportions of land cover classes. The existing spectral unmixing methods usually require pure spectr...

The occurrence of environmental clusters of Chronic Kidney Disease of uncertain aetiology (CKDu), where there is no known cause for the onset of kidney dysfunction, is a concern globally. Waterborne exposure pathways in the environment may result in indirect or direct ingestion of trace elements with potential health risks. This research examines t...

Objectives The aim of the study was to investigate the spatial and temporal relationships between the prevalence of COVID-19 symptoms in the community-level and area-level social deprivation. Design Spatial mapping, generalised linear models, using time as a factor and spatial-lag models were used to explore the relationship between self-reported...

Africa continues to experience the highest infectious disease burden despite an increase in investments. These include investments in malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, as well as in communicable diseases. The global targets are to reduce the burden of these diseases through improved surveillance, prevention of outbreaks, effective case management, e...

Mapping surface water distribution and its dynamics over various environments with robust methods is essential for managing water resources and supporting water-related policy design. Thresholding Single Water Index image (TSWI) with threshold is a common way of using water index (WI) for mapping water for it is easy to use and could obtain accepta...

The Terra/Aqua MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data have been used widely for global monitoring of the Earth's surface due to their daily fine temporal resolution. The spatial resolution of MODIS time-series (i.e., 500 m), however, is too coarse for local monitoring. A feasible solution to this problem is to downscale the coar...

Small area change detection using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is a highly challenging task, due to speckle noise and imbalance between classes (changed and unchanged). In this paper, a robust unsupervised approach is proposed for small area change detection using deep learning techniques. First, a multi-scale superpixel reconstruction me...

Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a new strain of coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China. As the virus spread worldwide causing a global pandemic, China reduced transmission at considerable social and economic cost. Post-lockdown, resuming work safely, that is, while avoiding a second epidemic outbreak, is a major challenge. Exacerbating this c...

Semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images plays an important role in land resource management, yield estimation, and economic assessment. U-Net, a deep encoder-decoder architecture, has been used frequently for image segmentation with high accuracy. In this letter, we incorporate multiscale features generated by different layers of U-Net and...

Impervious surfaces have important effects on the natural environment, including promoting hydrological run-off and impeding evapotranspiration, as well as increasing the urban heat island effect. Obtaining accurate and timely information on the spatial distribution and dynamics of urban surfaces is, thus, of paramount importance for socio-economic...

This is the Matlab code of the OATPRK algorithm. Moreover, the IKONOS multispectral and panchromatic images used in the paper are attached in the code file. Please refer to the references: Yihang Zhang, Peter M. Atkinson, Feng Ling, Giles M. Foody, Qunming Wang, et al. "Object-based Area-to-point Regression Kriging for Pansharpening," IEEE Trans...

Large-scale {(large-area)}, fine spatial resolution satellite sensor images are valuable data sources for Earth observation while not yet fully exploited by research communities for practical applications. Often, such images exhibit highly complex geometrical structures and spatial patterns, and distinctive characteristics of multiple land-use cate...

The scan-line corrector (SLC) of the Landsat 7 ETM+ failed permanently in 2003, resulting in about 22% unscanned gap pixels in the SLC-off images, affecting greatly the utility of the ETM+ data. To address this issue, we propose a spatial-spectral radial basis function (SSRBF)-based interpolation method to fill gaps in SLC-off images. Different fro...

The point spread function (PSF) effect is ubiquitous in remote sensing images and imposes a fundamental uncertainty on subpixel mapping (SPM). The crucial PSF effect has been neglected in existing SPM methods. This paper proposes a general model to reduce the PSF effect in SPM. The model is applicable to any SPM methods treating spectral unmixing a...