Remote Sensing, Vol. 13, Pages 3721: Smoke Detection from Himawari-8 Satellite Data over Kalimantan Island Using Multilayer Perceptrons (Remote Sensing)

The smoke from biomass burning on Kalimantan Island has caused severe environmental problems in Southeast Asia`s primary burning regions and surrounding regions due to the overspread haze. To monitor the biomass burning aerosol plumes on Kalimantan Island, the high-temporal-resolution Himawari-8 satellite data were used in this study. However, studies are limited on smoke detection using satellite remote sensing for Kalimantan Island because of the difficulty caused by frequently occurring clouds and the lack of prior knowledge on applying traditional threshold methods. In this study, we used the multilayer perceptron (MLP) method to identify smoke over Kalimantan Island in August 2015, one of the most severe fire seasons. To prepare sufficient supervision information, a pixel-level labeled dataset was established based on the Himawari-8 data. Based on the labeled dataset, three MLP approaches and two sampling methods were applied to create training samples. A comparison between the detection results for the MLP approaches and classification tree analysis (i.e., CTA) showed that MLP is superior to CTA. The visualization results also showed that the detected smoke areas included those mixed with clouds. Some detected smoke is difficult to identify by the human eye, suggesting that the explanatory dataset built for this study is sufficiently comprehensive. Therefore, the pixel-level labeled dataset and MLP are suitable for regions that are frequently cloud-covered.