The public-interest direct payment program involves providing direct payments to agricultural producers and rural residents through public funds, premised on performing public functions such as environmental conservation, stable food supply, and maintaining rural communities via agricultural activities. Scientific estimation of crop cultivation areas and production levels is crucial for formulating agricultural policies linked to regulating food supply, which increasingly impacts the national economy. Conducting comprehensive on-site inspections for compliance monitoring of direct payment programs has shown very low efficiency in relation to budget and time. The expansion of areas subject to compliance monitoring and various challenges in on-site inspections necessitate streamlining current monitoring methods and devising effective strategies. As a solution, the application of Remote Sensing technology and spatial information utilization, allowing swift acquisition of necessary information for policies without overall on-site visits, is being discussed as an efficient compliance monitoring method. Therefore, this study evaluated the potential use of remote sensing for improving operational efficiency in monitoring compliance with public-interest direct payment programs. Using satellite images during farming seasons in Gimje and Hapcheon, vegetation indices and spatial variations were utilized to identify cultivated areas, presence of mixed crops, validated against on-site inspection data.

In the context of maritime emergencies, the utilization of drones has rapidly increased, with a particular focus on their application in search and rescue operations. Deep learning models utilizing drone images for the rapid detection of distressed vessels and other maritime drift objects are gaining attention. However, effective training of such models necessitates a substantial amount of diverse training data that considers various weather conditions and vessel states. The lack of such data can lead to a degradation in the performance of trained models. This study aims to enhance the performance of deep learning models for distress ship detection by developing a maritime environment simulator to augment the dataset. The simulator allows for the configuration of various weather conditions, vessel states such as sinking or capsizing, and specifications and characteristics of drones and sensors. Training the deep learning model with the dataset generated through simulation resulted in improved detection performance, including accuracy and recall, when compared to models trained solely on actual drone image datasets. In particular, the accuracy of distress ship detection in adverse weather conditions, such as rain or fog, increased by approximately 2–5%, with a significant reduction in the rate of undetected instances. These results demonstrate the practical and effective contribution of the developed simulator in simulating diverse scenarios for model training. Furthermore, the distress ship detection deep learning model based on this approach is expected to be efficiently applied in maritime search and rescue operations.

Vegetation indices based on selected wavelength reflectance measurements are used to represent crop growth and physiological conditions. However, the anisotropic properties of the crop canopy surface can govern spectral reflectance and vegetation indices. In this study, we applied an ensemble of bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) models to high-resolution Sentinel- 2 satellite imagery and compared the differences between correction results before and after reflectance. In the red and near-infrared (NIR) band reflectance images, BRDF-corrected outlier values appeared in certain urban and paddy fields of farmland areas and forest shadow areas. These effects were equally observed when calculating the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and 2-band enhanced vegetation index (EVI2). Furthermore, the outlier values in corrected NIR band were shown in pixels shadowed by mountain terrain. These results are expected to contribute to the development and improvement of BRDF models in high-resolution satellite images.

Out of the total 17,000 reservoirs in Korea, 13,600 small agricultural reservoirs do not have hydrological measurement facilities, making it difficult to predict water storage volume and appropriate operation. This paper examined univariate and multivariate long short-term memory (LSTM) modeling to predict the storage rate of agricultural reservoirs using remote sensing and artificial intelligence. The univariate LSTM model used only water storage rate as an explanatory variable, and the multivariate LSTM model added n-day accumulative precipitation and date of year (DOY) as explanatory variables. They were trained using eight years data (2013 to 2020) for Idong Reservoir, and the predictions of the daily water storage in 2021 were validated for accuracy assessment. The univariate showed the rootmean square error (RMSE) of 1.04%, 2.52%, and 4.18% for the one, three, and five-day predictions. The multivariate model showed the RMSE 0.98%, 1.95%, and 2.76% for the one, three, and five-day predictions. In addition to the time-series storage rate, DOY and daily and 5-day cumulative precipitation variables were more significant than others for the daily model, which means that the temporal range of the impacts of precipitation on the everyday water storage rate was approximately five days.

Due to recent severe climate change, abnormal weather phenomena, and other factors, the frequency and magnitude of natural disasters are increasing. The need for disaster management using artificial satellites is growing, especially during large-scale disasters due to time and economic constraints. In this study, we have summarized the current status of next-generation medium-sized satellites and microsatellites in operation and under development, as well as trends in satellite imagery analysis techniques using a large volume of satellite imagery driven by the advancement of the space industry. Furthermore, by utilizing satellite imagery, particularly focusing on recent major disasters such as floods, landslides, droughts, and wildfires, we have confirmed how satellite imagery can be employed for damage analysis, thereby establishing its potential for disaster management. Through this study, we have presented satellite development and operational statuses, recent trends in satellite imagery analysis technology, and proposed disaster response strategies that utilize various types of satellite imagery. It was observed that during the stages of disaster progression, the utilization of satellite imagery is more prominent in the response and recovery stages than in the prevention and preparedness stages. In the future, with the availability of diverse imagery, we plan to research the fusion of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and deep learning, and their applicability for effective disaster management.

The Operational Linescan System (OLS) sensor is a sensor aboard satellites launched through the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) that detects light in the visible and infrared bands emitted at night. Studies by several researchers have shown a high correlation between nighttime light data from OLS sensors and gross domestic product values. In this study, we investigated the correlation of nighttime light data with the total amount of individual land prices, which is one of the various indicators related to economic development. The study found that most cities and provinces showed a high correlation with a correlation coefficient of more than 0.7, and the correlation coefficient of 0.7837 between the total amount of individual land price and nighttime light data for the entire South Korea was also high. However, unlike other cities and provinces, Seoul has a low correlation coefficient of 0.5648 between nighttime light and the total amount of individual land price, which is analyzed as a reason that the digital number value of the OLS sensor is close to the maximum value and cannot show further brightness changes. This study is expected to help identify announced land prices in areas where announced land prices are not systematically organized and to analyze land use changes in such areas.

When converting rice fields into fields, sorghum (sorghum bicolor L. Moench) has excellent moisture resistance, enabling stable production along with soybeans. Therefore, it is a crop that is expected to improve the self-sufficiency rate of domestic food crops and solve the rice supply-demand imbalance problem. However, there is a lack of fundamental statistics, such as cultivation fields required for estimating yields, due to the traditional survey method, which takes a long time even with a large manpower. In this study, U-Net was applied to RGB images based on unmanned aerial vehicle to confirm the possibility of non-destructive segmentation of sorghum cultivation fields. RGB images were acquired on July 28, August 13, and August 25, 2022. On each image acquisition date, datasets were divided into 6,000 training datasets and 1,000 validation datasets with a size of 512 × 512 images. Classification models were developed based on three classes consisting of Sorghum fields (sorghum), rice and soybean fields (others), and non-agricultural fields (background), and two classes consisting of sorghum and nonsorghum (others+background). The classification accuracy of sorghum cultivation fields was higher than 0.91 in the three class-based models at all acquisition dates, but learning confusion occurred in the other classes in the August dataset. In contrast, the two-class-based model showed an accuracy of 0.95 or better in all classes, with stable learning on the August dataset. As a result, two class-based models in August will be advantageous for calculating the cultivation fields of sorghum.

Satellite altimeters have continuously observed sea surface height (SSH) in the global ocean for the past 30 years, providing clear evidence of the rise in global mean sea level based on observational data. Accurate altimeter-observed SSH is essential to study the spatial and temporal variability of SSH in regional seas. In this study, we used measurements from the Ieodo Ocean Research Station (IORS) and validate SSHs observed by satellite altimeters (Envisat, Jason-1, Jason-2, SARAL, Jason-3, and Sentinel-3A/B). Bias and root mean square error of SSH for each satellite ranged from 1.58 to 4.69 cm and 6.33 to 9.67 cm, respectively. As the matchup distance between satellite ground tracks and the IORS increased, the error of satellite SSHs significantly amplified. In order to validate the correction of the tide and atmospheric effect of the satellite data, the tide was estimated using harmonic analysis, and inverse barometer effect was calculated using atmospheric pressure data at the IORS. To achieve accurate tidal corrections for satellite SSH data in the seas around the Korean Peninsula, it was confirmed that improving the accuracy of tide data used in satellites is necessary.

North Korea is carrying out reclamation activities in tidal flat areas distributed throughout the west coast. Previous remote sensing research on North Korean tidal flats either fails to reflect recent trends or focuses on identifying and analyzing tidal flats. This study aims to quantify the impact of recent reclamation activities in North Korea’s coastal areas and contribute knowledge useful for determining the best remote sensing methods for coastal areas with limited accessibility, such as those in North Korea. Using Landsat-8 OLI images from 2014–2022, we analyzed land cover changes in an area on the west coast of Pyeonganbuk-do where reclamation activities are underway. Unsupervised classification using the normalized difference water index and the random forest classification technique were each used to divide the study area into classification groups, and changes in their areas over time were analyzed. The results show a clear decrease in the water area and a tendency to increase cultivated area, supporting the evidence that North Korea’s reclamation is for agricultural land expansion. Along coasts behind seawalls, the water area decreased by nearly half, and the cultivated area increased by over 2,300%, indicating significant changes and highlighting the anthropogenic nature of the cover changes due to reclamation. Both methods demonstrated high accuracy, making them suitable for detecting cover changes caused by reclamation. It is expected that further quality research will be conducted through the use of high-resolution satellite images and by combining data from multiple satellites in the future.

Super-resolution (SR) has great significance in image processing because it enables downstream vision tasks with high spatial resolution. Recently, SR studies have adopted deep learning networks and achieved remarkable SR performance compared to conventional example-based methods. Deep-learning-based SR models generally require low-resolution (LR) images and the corresponding high-resolution (HR) images as training dataset. Due to the difficulties in obtaining real-world LR-HR datasets, most SR models have used only HR images and generated LR images with predefined degradation such as bicubic downsampling. However, SR models trained on simple image degradation do not reflect the properties of the images and often result in deteriorated SR qualities when applied to real-world images. In this study, we propose an image degradation model for HR satellite images based on the modulation transfer function (MTF) of an imaging sensor. Because the proposed method determines the image degradation based on the sensor properties, it is more suitable for training SR models on remote sensing images. Experimental results on HR satellite image datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of applying MTF-based filters to construct a more realistic LR-HR training dataset.