Detection of County Economic Development Using LJ1-01 Nighttime Light Imagery: A Comparison with NPP-VIIRS Data

Abstract

Nighttime light (NTL) remote sensing data have been widely used to derive socioeconomic indicators at the national and regional scales to study regional economic development. However, most previous studies only chose a single measurement indicator (such as GDP) and adopted simple regression methods to investigate the economic development of a certain area based on DMSP-OLS or NPP-VIIRS stable NTL data. The status quo shows the problems of using a single evaluation index—it has a low evaluation precision. The LJ1-01 satellite is the first dedicated NTL remote sensing satellite in the world, launched in July 2018. The data provided by LJ1-01 have a higher spatial resolution and fewer blooming phenomena. In this paper, we compared the accuracy of the LJ1-01 data and NPP-VIIRS data in detecting county-level multidimensional economic development. In three provinces in China, namely, Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi, 20 socioeconomic parameters were selected from the following five perspectives: economic conditions, people’s livelihood, social development, public resources and natural vulnerability. Then, a County-level Economic Index (CEI) was constructed to evaluate the level of multidimensional economic development, with the spatial pattern of the multidimensional economic development also identified across the study area. The present study adopted the random forest (RF) and linear regression (LR) algorithms to establish the regression model individually, and the results were evaluated by cross-validation. The results show that the RF algorithm greatly improves the accuracy of the model compared with the LR algorithm, and thus is suitable for the study of NTL data. In addition, a better determinate coefficient (R2) based on the LJ1-01 data (0.8168) was obtained than that from the NPP-VIIRS data (0.7245) in the RF model, which reflects that the LJ1-01 data offer better potential in the evaluation of socioeconomic parameters and can be used to identify, both accurately and efficiently, multidimensional economic development at the county level.

Refined Carbon Emission Measurement Based on NPP-VIIRS Nighttime Light Data: A Case Study of the Pearl River Delta Region, China

“…From the perspective of the data source, NPP-VIIRS nighttime lighting data have great data accessibility, data quality, and temporal continuity, which proves this study could be replicated in similar situations. Compared to other nighttime lighting data sources—for example, the LJ1-01 data [ 17 ] and the DMSP-OLS data [ 26 ]—the former are only disclosed until 2018, while the latter are relatively old. However, NPP-VIIRS data have been updated and maintained all the time, although the spatial resolution is inferior to that of the Luojia-1 data.…”

“…Nighttime light data have the advantages of a wide coverage, a long time span, and a simultaneous large area of ground information [ 13 ]. It can reveal the intensity of economic and human activities and has become one of the most important geographic information data [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. With the rapid development of remote sensing technology, many scholars have increasingly utilized nighttime light data in various studies such as the multi-center extraction of urban agglomeration and the estimation of economic and social factors.…”

Estimation and Analysis of the Nighttime PM2.5 Concentration Based on LJ1-01 Images: A Case Study in the Pearl River Delta Urban Agglomeration of China

“…However, compared to the PM 2.5 concentration estimation model with NPP-VIIRS nighttime light images information, the accuracy of the PM 2.5 concentration estimation model with the LJ1-01 nighttime light images information has been improved. In addition, in terms of socio-economic parameter modeling, the accuracy of the model added to LJ1-01 nighttime light images information is also higher [62].…”

Identification of Villages’ Development Types Using a Comprehensive Natural–Socioeconomic Framework

“…Since the 1990s, the nighttime light remote sensing data were gradually used to objectively reflect the level of social and economic development of a region [31]. Especially, the Luojia1-01 image can reflect social and economic development in finer spatial resolution, which is one of the most professional types of nighttime light remote sensing data [32], and it was used to detect the development of constructed areas, e.g., county-level regions in Hubei, Hunan, and Jiangxi [33]. However, the application of Luojia1-01 is temporally concentrated in urban areas [34], involving population spatialization [35], population distribution [36], economic index prediction [37], etc.…”