Monitor water quality through retrieving water quality parameters from hyperspectral images using graph convolution network with superposition of multi-point effect: A case study in Maozhou River

Quantitative prediction by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing on water quality parameters (WQPs) including phosphorus, nitrogen, chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and chlorophyll a (Chl-a), total suspended solids (TSS), and turbidity provides a flexible and effective approach to monitor the variation in water quality. In this study, a deep learning-based method integrating graph convolution network (GCN), gravity model variant, and dual feedback machine involving parametric probability analysis and spatial distribution pattern analysis, named Graph Convolution Network with Superposition of Multi-point Effect (SMPE-GCN) has been developed to calculate concentrations of WQPs through UAV hyperspectral reflectance data on large scale efficiently. With an end-to-end structure, our proposed method has been applied to assisting environmental protection department to trace potential pollution sources in real time. The proposed method is trained on a real-world dataset and its effectiveness is validated on an equal amount of testing dataset with respect to three evaluation metrics including root of mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute percent error (MAPE), and coefficient of determination (R2). The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves better performance in comparison with state-of-the-art baseline models in terms of RMSE, MAPE, and R2. The proposed method is applicable for quantifying seven various WQPs and has achieved good performance for each WQP. The resulting MAPE ranges from 7.16% to 10.96% and R2 ranges from 0.80 to 0.94 for all WQPs. This approach brings a novel and systematic insight into real-time quantitative water quality monitoring of urban rivers, and provides a unified framework for in-situ data acquisition, feature engineering, data conversion, and data modeling for further research. It provides fundamental support to assist environmental managers to efficiently monitor water quality of urban rivers.