Xavier Briottet

The French Aerospace Lab ONERA | ONERA · DOTA - Department of Theoretical and Applied Optics

In a previous paper, we introduced (i) a specific hyperspectral mixing model for the sea bottom, based on a detailed physical analysis that includes the adjacency effect, and (ii) an associated unmixing method that is supervised (i.e., not blind) in the sense that it requires a prior estimation of various parameters of the mixing model, which is co...

Pluvial floods caused by extreme overland flow inland account for half of all flood damage claims each year along with fluvial floods. In order to increase confidence in pluvial flood susceptibility mapping, overland flow models need to be intensively evaluated using observations from past events. However, most remote-sensing-based flood detection...

The CAMCATT-AI4GEO extensive field experiment took place in Toulouse, a city in the southwest of France, from 14th to 25th June 2021 (with complementary measurements performed on the 6 September 2021). Its main objective was the acquisition of a new reference dataset on an urban site to support the development and validation of data products from t...

Imaging spectroscopy has demonstrated its interest in characterizing the biochemical, biophysical and structural properties of vegetation, natural and agricultural soils, as well as artificial surfaces. Following the Hyperion mission, new space missions have emerged (PRISMA, EnMap), or are under study (CHIME, SBG). However, one of their main limita...

The HYEP project (ANR HYEP 14-CE22-0016-01 Hyperspectral imagery for Environmental urban Planning - Mobility and Urban Systems Programme - 2014) confirmed the interest of a global approach to the urban environment by remote sensing and in particular by using hyperspectral imaging (HI). The interest of hyperspectral images lies in the range of infor...

Considering a set of observed signals that result from mixing (i.e. combining) a set of unknown source signals by means of an unknown function, blind source separation (BSS) and blind mixture identification (BMI) methods aim at estimating these source signals and/or the mixing function. Such methods have been extensively used, e.g. to process hyper...

The combination of machine learning models with physical models is a recent research path to learn robust data representations. In this paper, we introduce p$^3$VAE, a generative model that integrates a perfect physical model which partially explains the true underlying factors of variation in the data. To fully leverage our hybrid design, we propo...

Machine learning algorithms demonstrated promising results for hyperspectral semantic segmentation. However, they strongly rely on the quality of training datasets. As far as the annotation of hyperspectral images is often expensive and time-consuming, only a few thousand pixels can be labeled. In this context, active learning algorithms select the...

The estimation and mapping of vegetation traits from satellite hyperspectral imagery is entering a new era, as multiple missions have recently started and more are currently in preparatory phase. With expected ground sampling distances (GSD) ranging from 8 to 30 m, these missions could complement each other, especially over spatially heterogeneous...

Coastal and inland aquatic ecosystems are of fundamental interest for societal and economical purposes due to a significant part of the population living there. They both highly contribute to carbon cycling and biodiversity. Those ecosystems are continuously impacted by natural processes and human activities. Many of these impacts become more frequ...

This paper presents MARMIT-2, a radiative transfer model that predicts the spectral reflectance of soils in the solar domain (0.4–2.5 μm) as a function of their surface moisture. This is an improved version of MARMIT (multilayer radiative transfer model of soil reflectance) that represents a wet soil as a dry soil topped with a thin layer of liquid...

Individual tree crown (ITC) delineation in temperate forests is challenging owing to the presence of broadleaved species with overlapping crowns. Mixed coniferous/deciduous forests with characteristics that differ with the type of tree thus require a flexible method of delineation. The ITC delineation method based on the multi-criteria graph (MCG-T...

Along with fluvial floods (FFs), surface water floods (SWFs) caused by extreme overland flow are one of the main flood hazards occurring after heavy rainfall. Using physics-based distributed hydrological models, surface runoff can be simulated from precipitation inputs to investigate regions prone to soil erosion, mudflows or landslides. Geomatics...

Hyperspectral pansharpening methods in the reflective domain are limited by the large difference between the visible panchromatic (PAN) and hyperspectral (HS) spectral ranges, which notably leads to poor representation of the SWIR (1.0–2.5 μm) spectral domain. A novel instrument concept is proposed in this study, by introducing a second PAN channel...

The monitoring of the Land Surface Temperature (LST) by remote sensing in urban areas is of great interest to study the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) effect. Thus, it is one of the goals of the future spaceborne mission TRISHNA, which will carry a thermal radiometer onboard with four bands at a 60-m spatial resolution, acquiring daytime and nigh...

Most flood hazards are induced either by river overflowing or intense overland flow following heavy rainfall, causing land surface damages under many forms. Until now, fine-scale detection of damages caused by intense rainwater runoff beyond the direct vicinity of major waterways has been scarcely explored using satellite remote sensing. In this wo...

Equivalent water thickness (EWT) and leaf mass per area (LMA) are important indicators of plant processes, such as photosynthetic and potential growth rates and health status, and are also important variables for fire risk assessment. Retrieving these traits through remote sensing is challenging and often requires calibration with in situ measureme...

In preparation of the micro-bolometer-based MIcro Satellite for Thermal Infrared GRound surface Imaging (MISTIGRI) mission, we study the error budget of the Temperature-Emissivity Separation (TES) method using several spectral configurations that differ in channel numbers, locations, and widths. The error budget quantifies the contribution of 1) th...

In the context of climate change and rising frequency of extreme hydro-meteorological events around the world, flood risk management and mapping of heavy rainfall-related damages represent an ongoing critical challenge. For decades now, remote sensing has been largely used to investigate spatial and temporal changes in land use and water resources....

With the advancement of high spatial resolution imaging spectroscopy, an accurate surface reflectance retrieval is needed to derive relevant physical variables for land cover mapping, soil, and vegetation monitoring. One challenge is to deal with tree shadows using atmospheric correction models if the tree crown transmittance Tc is not properly tak...

This article studies the influence of the number of satellite remote sensing acquisition dates and their sampling on the performance of a time series reconstruction method developed in Granero-Belinchon et al. 2020. This method initially aimed at monitoring urban London plane (Platanus x acerifolia) trees, and was tested with Sentinel-2 imagery at...

An improved version of the MARMIT model is proposed. Wet soil is represented as a dry soil layer surmounted by a layer of a mixture of water and soil particles.

Combination of numerous satellite data has lately become available to cover large areas with very high spatial resolution (VHR) and high revisit frequency. Little studies have yet made use of these images to assess and map damages following an extreme rainfall event, in particular those caused by rainwater runoff. We therefore investigate a specifi...

Gap Fraction, leaf pigment contents (content of chlorophylls a and b (Cab) and carotenoids content (Car)), Leaf Mass per Area (LMA), and Equivalent Water Thickness (EWT) are considered relevant indicators of forests’ health status, influencing many biological and physical processes. Various methods exist to estimate these variables, often relying o...

Hyperspectral unmixing is a widely studied field of research aiming at estimating the pure material signatures and their abundance fractions from hyperspectral images. Most spectral unmixing methods are based on prior knowledge and assumptions that induce limitations, such as the existence of at least one pure pixel for each material. This work pre...

Earth observation at the local scale implies working on images with both high spatial and spectral resolutions. As the latter cannot be simultaneously provided by current sensors, hyperspectral pansharpening methods combine images jointly acquired by two different sensors, a panchromatic one providing high spatial resolution, and a hyperspectral on...

The authors are sorry to report that some of the validation data used in their recently published paper [...]

Monitoring of coastal areas by remote sensing is an important issue. The interest of using an unmixing method to determine the seabed composition from hyperspectral aerial images of coastal areas is investigated. Unmixing provides both seabed abundances and endmember reflectances. A sub-surface mixing model is presented, based on a recently propose...

TRUST (Thermal Remote sensing Unmixing for Subpixel Temperature) is a spectral unmixing method developed to provide subpixel abundances and temperatures from radiance images in the thermal domain. By now, this method has been studied in simple study cases, with a low number of endmembers, high spatial resolutions (1 m) and more than 30 spectral ban...

Clay minerals play an important role in shrinking–swelling of soils and off–road vehicle mobility mainly due to the presence of smectites including montmorillonites. Since soils are composed of different minerals intimately mixed, an accurate estimation of its abundance is challenging. Imaging spectroscopy in the short wave infrared spectral region...

This article presents a novel methodology for the characterization of tree vegetation phenology, based on vegetation indices time series reconstruction and adapted to urban areas. The methodology is based on a pixel by pixel curve fitting classification, together with a subsequent Savitzky–Golay filtering of raw phenological curves from pixels clas...

Hyperspectral imagery consists of hundreds of contiguous spectral bands. However, most of them are redundant. Thus a subset of well-chosen bands is generally sufficient for a specific problem, enabling to design adapted superspectral sensors dedicated to specific land cover classification. Related both to feature selection and extraction, spectral...

Leaf pigment contents, such as chlorophylls a and b content (C a b ) or carotenoid content (Car), and the leaf area index (LAI) are recognized indicators of plants’ and forests’ health status that can be estimated through hyperspectral imagery. Their measurement on a seasonal and yearly basis is critical to monitor plant response and adaptation to...

A laboratory experiment is set up to study both surface and in-depth soil moisture content (SMC). For that purpose, an aquarium is filled successively with two soils, a clay loam and a sand. Reflectance spectra are acquired in the solar domain (400–2400 nm) on the soil surface using an ASD FieldSpec 3 HR spectroradiometer and in-depth through the a...

High-spectral-resolution hyperspectral data are acquired by sensors that gather images from hundreds of narrow and contiguous bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. These data offer unique opportunities for characterization and precise land surface recognition in urban areas. So far, few studies have been conducted with these data to automatically...

In a very recent paper, we introduced (i) a specific hyper-spectral mixing model for the sea bottom, based on a detailed physical analysis which includes the adjacency effect, and (ii) an associated unmixing method, which is not blind in the sense that it requires a prior estimation of various parameters of that mixing model. We here proceed much f...

The Indian and French Space Agencies, ISRO and CNES, have conceptualized a space-borne Thermal Infrared Reflectance (TIR) mission, TRISHNA (Thermal infRared Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural Resource Assessment). The primary design drivers of TRISHNA are the monitoring of (i) terrestrial water stress and use, and of (ii) coastal and con...

Hyperspectral sensors have a limited spatial resolution so that, when observing the Earth, each pixel of a hyperspectral image corresponds to a surface on Earth which is often composed of different pure materials. The radiance or reflectance spectrum of such a pixel is then a mixture of the spectra of the corresponding pure materials. In particular...

Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) at the surface and canopy levels are major issues in urban planification and development. For this reason, the comprehension and quantification of the influence that the different land-uses/land-covers have on UHIs is of particular importance. In order to perform a detailed thermal characterisation of the city, measures co...

This work is linked to the future Indian–French high spatio-temporal TRISHNA (Thermal infraRed Imaging Satellite for High-resolution natural resource Assessment) mission, which includes shortwave and thermal infrared bands, and is devoted amongst other things to the monitoring of urban heat island events. In this article, the performance of seven e...

The future space joint-mission TRISHNA (Thermal infraRed Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural resource Assessment, CNES and ISRO) will allow to retrieve LST at 60 m spatial resolution every 3 days, improving the urban environment monitoring capacities. Two methods can be used to derive LST from remote sensing TIR data, Split-Window (SW) or...

In-flight assessment of the radiometric performances of space-borne instruments can be achieved by means of vicarious calibration over Pseudo-Invariant Calibration Sites (PICS). PICS are chosen for the high temporal stability of their surface optical properties combined with a high spatial homogeneity. A first list of the main desert PIC sites was...

The THEIA Land Data and Services Centre (www.theia-land.fr) is a consortium of 12 French public institutions involved in Earth observation and environmental sciences (CEA, CEREMA, CIRAD, CNES, IGN, INRA, CNRS, IRD, Irstea, Météo France, AgroParisTech, and ONERA). THEIA has been initiated in 2012 with the objective of increasing the use of space dat...

The estimation of the bathymetry and the detection of targets located on the seabed of shallow waters using remote sensing techniques is of great interest for many environmental applications in coastal areas such as benthic habitat mapping, monitoring of seabed aquatic plants and the subsequent management of littoral zones. For that purpose, knowle...

This study aims at identifying the best object-based fusion strategy that takes advantage of the complementarity of several heterogeneous airborne data sources for improving the classification of 15 tree species in an urban area (Toulouse, France). The airborne data sources are: hyperspectral Visible Near-Infrared (160 spectral bands, spatial resol...

This study presents the work developed as a CEOS action for which CSIRO and DLR taken the lead on a feasibility assessment to determine the benefits and technological difficulties of designing an Earth observing satellite mission focused on the aquatic (non-oceanic) ecosystems. I n fact, many Earth observing sensors have been designed, built and la...