Landslides are one of the most frequently occurring natural disasters worldwide, often resulting in significant casualties, substantial loss of life, and extensive property damage. Certain areas are more susceptible to landslides due to various natural factors such as soil type, average rainfall, and land cover, as well as human factors like proximity to roads, mining activities, and other human settlements. Over the years, researchers have employed various methods to identify areas with a higher likelihood of landslides. One such method is the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multicriteria decision-making process. The main advantage of AHP is its welldefined mathematical framework, which incorporates expert opinions to generate insights. Additionally, various machine learning models have been used to calculate the susceptibility of an area to landslides, with their performance depending on the number and quality of training samples available. Generating input data for both AHP and machine learning models is time- and effort-intensive. It usually requires obtaining data from multiple sources at different resolutions, resampling to a common resolution, and mosaicking the data to form a unified raster for each input feature. Furthermore, all input features must be resampled to a common resolution. In our current work, we propose a unique technique that combines both AHP and machine learning-based models. Our primary objective is to accurately detect past landslides in a given region while optimizing the time and effort required to generate input data. We evaluate our proposed model’s performance in terms of accuracy on landslide data from Italy and compare it with the performance of standalone AHP and machine learning models in terms of (i) accuracy and (ii) the time and effort required to generate input data for each model. The results are promising, with our proposed model surpassing the AHP model’s performance and being almost as accurate as the standalone machine learning model, while requiring less than half the time and effort to generate input data compared to the standalone AHP and machine learning models.
KEYWORDS: COVID 19, Artificial intelligence, Pollution, Air contamination, Carbon monoxide, Particles, Correlation coefficients, Random forests, Linear regression, Diseases and disorders
The work presented here aims to understand how exposure to air pollutants for a prolonged period of time might correlate with the number of COVID-19 deaths. In our past work, we had investigated this, and found strong correlation between the two. In our current work, we divided cities based on various factors like population density, number of vehicles and so on, for points-based analysis. We used information from the Sentinel-5P satellite to determine the pollution concentration for cities. Specifically, we looked at the concentration of sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), aerosols, carbon monoxide (CO), and ozone (O3). The data regarding the number of deaths due to COVID-19 was gathered from various news reports. Our analysis further strengthened the hypothesis of a strong link between long-term exposure to air pollutants and the number of COVID-19 deaths. This correlation was even stronger for cities likely to have higher air pollution load.
Coronavirus is known to cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The effects of the infections were severe in the case of premedical conditions in the subjects. A case in this point; the prolonged exposure of air pollution and associated health risks. In this work we study the relation between mortality and the long-term exposure to air pollution in urban centers of Maharashtra, India. In addition to analyzing the general trend, we focused on the cities in western Maharashtra, which are more developed as compared to the rest of the Maharashtra. The main objective of the study was to establish the relation between the air pollution and COVID-19 morbidity. The secondary objective was to establish the air pollution as a parameter for susceptibility to COVID-19 like pandemics. We used Sentinel-5P data for extracting the pollution concentration of sulphur dioxide (SO2), Nitrogen dioxide (NO2), Aerosol index, carbon monoxide (CO), and ozone (O3). The deaths in these cities were collected from the news reports. The relation between COVID-19 deaths and high-level of air pollution was amply evident from the analysis. The long-term exposure to pollution in the cities was found to be correlated with COVID-19 deaths. Furthermore, more industrialised cities showed stronger correlation. This may be attributed to the old part of cities where narrow roads confined by very closely space buildings on both the sides, heavy vehicular pollution, and poor ventilation often create a smoke chamber like situation. This needs to be investigated further using case specific data.
Industrial areas identification is an important problem in detecting urban land use. The industrial area contributes significantly to the carbon footprint and economic status of the region. Industrial buildings/factories are marked by metal roofs. We attempt to leverage this reasonably characteristic association for detecting industrial buildings. The foundation of our study is the spectral properties of industrial roofs which have high reflectance and flat spectrum. With these spectral properties of metal roofs, we have designed an algorithm with less time complexity as compared to the other approaches like matching reference signature with every pixel in the image or matched filter target detection approaches. The algorithm to detect the metal roof and hence industrial shade is divided into two main parts: 1. Calculating the relative reflectance of the image. 2. Calculating the spectral flatness of the pixels. In step one we use the high reflectance characteristics to calculate the relative reflectance of the image based on percentile brightness. In step two we use the flatness of the spectrum with the mean of consecutive band ratios. Thresholding on this band ratio gives us the industrial roof pixels. The algorithm is tested on the very well known hyperspectral images like Pavia University and Urban Image.
Urban land use classes of complex nature are marked by the presence of multiple land covers and/or objects in the specific spatial order. The spatial configuration of the constituent parts of the land use class is generally unique. To the extent that the specific spatial configuration is defining characteristic of a given land use class. These characteristics can be effectively leveraged to identify the land use class. In this research, we exploit the unique spatial structure of the constituent parts for the land use class for its detection. We use capsule network (CapsuleNet) for detecting some of the urban land use classes such as parking lot and golf courses. CapsuleNets use a group of neurons (called capsules) in a convolutional layer to detect a specific image primitive. Each subsequent layer detects higher order primitives, and its relationship with the lower level primitives. Thus, multiple such layers build a hierarchy of parts to learn the whole object, in this case the land use class. We conducted multiple experiments for detecting parking lots and golf courses in a collection of urban images. We used NWPU-RESISC45 dataset for conducting our experiments. Furthermore, we compared the results of CapsuleNet based architecture with standard architecture such as VGG16, which do not consider the spatial structure of the features. Our initial experiments suggest improvement in accuracy in classification of the land use classes such as parking lot and golf courses.
Unbalanced economic growth of cities in developing countries in recent past has affected urban environment adversely. Rapid urbanization has led to increase in the impervious surface within urban landscape. Further, this increase is associated with partial or complete loss of natural drainage in urban catchment area. This paper presents anticipated increase in runoff within a urban catchment area of Pune-Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PPCMC), India due to increase in the impervious surface over a decade. We used Landsat 7 images from 2001-2014 for detecting impervious surfaces within the region. Supervised classification of the area was done using Support Vector Machine (SVM). Digital Elevation Image (DEM) is acquired from CARTOSAT-1 for analysis of various catchment basins present in region. Finally we calculated runoff for 2001 and 2014 using rational flow equation. The comparison of 2001 and 2014 for PPCMC indicates increase in urban runoff by 87.8 percent just because of increase in impervious surface.
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