new publication Detecting Moving Trucks on Roads Using Sentinel-2 Data

new publication Detecting Moving Trucks on Roads Using Sentinel-2 Data

April 7, 2022

Our EAGLE student Henrik Fisser published his M.Sc. thesis “Detecting Moving Trucks on Roads Using Sentinel-2 Data” in Remote Sensing. From the abstract: “In most countries, freight is predominantly transported by road cargo trucks. We present a new satellite remote sensing method for detecting moving trucks on roads using Sentinel-2 data. The method exploits a temporal sensing offset of the Sentinel-2 multispectral instrument, causing spatially and spectrally distorted signatures of moving objects. A random forest classifier was trained (overall accuracy: 84%) on visual-near-infrared-spectra of 2500 globally labelled targets. Based on the classification, the target objects were extracted using a developed recursive neighbourhood search. The speed and the heading of the objects were approximated. Detections were validated by employing 350 globally labelled target boxes (mean F1 score: 0.74). The lowest F1 score was achieved in Kenya (0.36), the highest in Poland (0.88). Furthermore, validated at 26 traffic count stations in Germany on in sum 390 dates, the truck detections correlate spatio-temporally with station figures (Pearson r-value: 0.82, RMSE: 43.7). Absolute counts were underestimated on 81% of the dates. The detection performance may differ by season and road condition. Hence, the method is only suitable for approximating the relative truck traffic abundance rather than providing accurate absolute counts. However, existing road cargo monitoring methods that rely on traffic count stations or very high resolution remote sensing data have limited global availability. The proposed moving truck detection method could fill this gap, particularly where other information on road cargo traffic are sparse by employing globally and freely available Sentinel-2 data. It is inferior to the accuracy and the temporal detail of station counts, but superior in terms of spatial coverage.”

read the full article here:

Fisser, H.; Khorsandi, E.; Wegmann, M.; Baier, F. Detecting Moving Trucks on Roads Using Sentinel-2 Data. Remote Sens. 2022, 14, 1595. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14071595

you may also like:

Exploring Arctic Vegetation Patterns: PhD Fieldwork on Svalbard

Exploring Arctic Vegetation Patterns: PhD Fieldwork on Svalbard

This summer, one of our PhD students, Elio Rauth, embarked on an exciting scientific journey to the High Arctic—conducting detailed vegetation surveys on the remote archipelago of Svalbard. The aim? To better understand the intricate mosaic of Arctic plant communities...

John Friesen gives a talk at DLR

John Friesen gives a talk at DLR

On the 17th of July, Dr. John Friesen gave a inspiring talk at the seminar of the department "Georisks and Civil Security (GZS)" at the Earth Observation Center (EOC) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The talk was titled "Urbanization and infrastructure in the...

Successful PhD defense by Nina Haug

Successful PhD defense by Nina Haug

We congratulate Nina Haug from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) (Department of Architecture, Institute for Urban and Landscape Design, Chair of Urban Housing and Development) on her successful defense of her PhD thesis. The thesis is titled...

InnoLab presentations by Jean de Dieu Tuyizere and Gökçe Budak

InnoLab presentations by Jean de Dieu Tuyizere and Gökçe Budak

On Tuesday, the 15th of July, two InnoLab projects of our EAGLE students have been presented at our Earth Observation Research Cluster:   Jean de Dieu Tuyizere presented his topic titled "Building an Earth Observation Data Cube for Volcanoes National Park,...