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This paper presents a practical framework for the integration of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based photogrammetry and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) with application to open-pit mine areas, which includes UAV image and TLS point cloud acquisition, image and cloud point processing and integration, object-oriented classification and three-dimensional (3D) mapping and monitoring of open-pit mine areas. The proposed framework was tested in three open-pit mine areas in southwestern China. (1) With respect to extracting the conjugate points of the stereo pair of UAV images and those points between TLS point clouds and UAV images, some feature points were first extracted by the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) operator and the outliers were identified and therefore eliminated by the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) approach; (2) With respect to improving the accuracy of geo-positioning based on UAV imagery, the ground control points (GCPs) surveyed from global positioning systems (GPS) and the feature points extracted from TLS were integrated in the bundle adjustment, and three scenarios were designed and compared; (3) With respect to monitoring and mapping the mine areas for land reclamation, an object-based image analysis approach was used for the classification of the accuracy improved UAV ortho-image. The experimental results show that by introduction of TLS derived point clouds OPEN ACCESSRemote Sens. 2015, 7 6636 as GCPs, the accuracy of geo-positioning based on UAV imagery can be improved. At the same time, the accuracy of geo-positioning based on GCPs form the TLS derived point clouds is close to that based on GCPs from the GPS survey. The results also show that the TLS derived point clouds can be used as GCPs in areas such as in mountainous or high-risk environments where it is difficult to conduct a GPS survey. The proposed framework achieved a decimeter-level accuracy for the generated digital surface model (DSM) and digital orthophoto map (DOM), and an overall accuracy of 90.67% for classification of the land covers in the open-pit mine.

The extant experimental design to investigate warm glow and altruism elicits a single measure of crowdout. Not recognizing that impure altruism predicts crowd-out is a function of giving-by-others, this design's power to reject pure altruism varies with the level of giving-by-others, and it cannot identify the strength of warm glow and altruism preferences. These limitations are addressed with a new design that elicits crowd-out at a low and at a high level of giving-by-others. Consistent with impure altruism we find decreasing crowd-out as giving-by-others increases. However warm glow is weak in our experiment and altruism largely explains why people give.

Abstract:Water bodies are a fundamental element of urban ecosystems, and water mapping is critical for urban and landscape planning and management. Remote sensing has increasingly been used for water mapping in rural areas; however, when applied to urban areas, this spatially-explicit approach is a challenging task due to the fact that the water bodies are often of a small size and spectral confusion is common between water and the complex features in the urban environment. Water indexes are the most common method of water extraction at the pixel level. More recently, spectral mixture analysis (SMA) has been widely employed in analyzing the urban environment at the subpixel level. The objective of this study is to develop an automatic subpixel water mapping method (ASWM) which can achieve a high accuracy in urban areas. Specifically, we first apply a water index for the automatic extraction of mixed land-water pixels, and the pure water pixels that are generated in this process are exported as the final result. Secondly, the SMA technique is applied to the mixed land-water pixels for water abundance estimation. As for obtaining the most representative endmembers, we propose an adaptive iterative endmember selection method based on the spatial similarity of adjacent ground surfaces. One classical water index method (the modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI)), a pixel-level target detection method (constrained energy minimization (CEM)), and two widely used SMA methods (fully constrained least squares (FCLS) and multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA)) were chosen for the water mapping comparison in the experiments. The results indicate that the proposed ASWM was able to detect water pixels more efficiency than other unsupervised water extraction methods, and the water fractions estimated by the proposed ASWM method correspond closely to the reference fractions with the slopes of 0.97, 1.02, 1.04, and 0.98 and the R-squared values of 0.9454, 0.9486, 0.9665, and 0.9607 in regression analysis corresponding to different test regions. In the quantitative accuracy assessment, the ASWM method shows the best performance in water mapping with the mean kappa coefficient of 0.862, mean producer's accuracy of 82.8%, and mean user's accuracy of 91.8% for test regions.

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