Remote Sensing Inversion of Water Quality Grades Using a Stacked Generalization Approach

Sensors (Basel). 2024 Oct 18;24(20):6716. doi: 10.3390/s24206716.

Abstract

Understanding water quality is crucial for environmental management and policy formulation. However, existing methods for assessing water quality are often unable to fully integrate with multi-source remote sensing data. This study introduces a method that employs a stacking algorithm within the Google Earth Engine (GEE) for classifying water quality grades in the Songhua River Basin (SHRB). By leveraging the strengths of multiple machine learning models, the Stacked Generalization (SG) model achieved an accuracy of 91.67%, significantly enhancing classification performance compared to traditional approaches. Additionally, the analysis revealed substantial correlations between the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and precipitation with water quality grades. These findings underscore the efficacy of this method for effective water quality monitoring and its implications for understanding the influence of natural factors on water pollution.

Keywords: landsat-8; machine learning (ML); remote sensing (RS); sentinel-2; water pollution; water quality grades classification.