Urban Black-Odor Water Remote Sensing Mapping Based on Shadow Removal: A Case Study in Nanjing

Urban black-odor water is a serious water environmental problem worldwide that seriously affects the living environment and the health of residents. The detection of black-odor water is a primary problem of centralized governance. Remote sensing is an effective means for water-quality monitoring. However, in most urban areas, with their complex underlying conditions, black-odor water always shows an uncertain distribution and small area. Furthermore, because of similar spectral characteristics, it is easily confused with dark objects such as asphalt roads, dark roofs, bridges, river levees, and building shadows. In this article, we propose a new black-odor water detection method, without shadow misjudgment, for complex urban conditions. A remote sensing image from the Chinese high-resolution satellite Gaofen-2 (GF-2) was used for detection. Using
in situ
water-quality measurement data for verification, the results showed that the proposed method achieved an accuracy of 85.7% while reducing the false alarm rate to 3.5%. Compared to four other existing methods, the proposed method proved to be more practical because it can reduce the false extraction of nonblack-odor water to the greatest extent possible while ensuring accuracy The method proposed in this article has a good effect on the extraction of black-odor water in Nanjing City. Therefore, our method can be applied widely to screening and management of large-scale urban black-odor water and can provide reliable data for centralized treatment.