Optimum Object Analysis Of Islands Activities On South China Sea By DNB On VIIRS

A data processing and analyzing system was designed and made operational with free software to process the big data over the South China Sea (SCS), which are provided by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) to monitor the light distributions in the night. The VIIRS data are processed from the raw data (level-0) to geophysical data (level-3) using the International Polar Orbiter Processing Package (IPOPP), which are freely available from NASA. The Day Night Band (DNB) of VIIRS is extracted from the level-3 data and is geospatially projected for our region of interest (ROI) on the SCS. For those ingested data, an optimum object analysis in geographic domain was proposed to estimate the reclamation activities on coral reefs in the SCS using GDAL. A pixel base analysis of DNB data is possible to estimate the island activities independently among dredgers, support vessels, or buildings on coral reefs, but not appropriate to analyze the activities for as an integrated system or for the changes in the ROI. Although there is a difficulty to determine the scale of objects on the analysis of DNB data for the reclamation activities, the optimum object scale was empirically determined for different size of coral reefs and was applied for this study. The optimum object analysis determines the reclamation activities with including lights not only from buildings but also dredgers and supporting vessels around coral reefs