Monitoring The Economic Development Of Countries Along The Belt And Road Based On Nighttime Light Remote Sensing Technology

The Belt and Road Initiative is an important link connecting the three regions of Asia,Europe,and Africa,and plays an important role in the development of countries along the route and the entire international community.It is difficult to realize the multi-level,multi-angle,long-term series of rapid monitoring and analysis of spatial and temporal changes in the development of the countries along the Belt and Road with traditional statistical data evaluation methods.And nighttime light technology has been widely used in regional development-related research.Based on NPP-VIIRS nighttime light remote sensing data,this paper explores long-term stability monitoring methods for the economic development of countries along the Belt and Road.First,the NPP-VIIRS nighttime light imagery is denoised.After that,it analyzes the spatiotemporal pattern of the economic development of countries along the Belt and Road by combining GDP,electricity consumption and carbon emissions statistics.Finally,the comprehensive development level of the countries along the Belt and Road is assessed based on existing social development parameters.The main content and conclusions of the study include:(1)NPP-VIIRS nighttime light imagery denoising processing.In view of the widespread noise in VIIRS original data,the denoising effects of commonly used methods such as threshold method,DMSP mask method and VIIRS mask method are compared and analyzed,and a method of denoising by multi-period based on VIIRS mask is proposed.The results show that the denoising accuracy of the VIIRS mask method is better than that of the DMSP mask method and the double threshold method as a whole.And the VIIRS mask method is stable for large-scale,long-term sequence VIIRS nighttime light image denoising.On this basis,the multi-period denoising method can further reduce the denoising error caused by the time difference between the mask image and the image to be denoised.(2)Analyze the spatiotemporal pattern of the economic development of countries along the Belt and Road.Combining denoised nighttime light data with key development indicator statistics,a key development indicator estimation model for countries along the Belt and Road was constructed.Taking GDP,electric power consumption and carbon emission indicators as examples,the analysis of the changes in the spatial and temporal pattern of economic development of the countries along the Belt and Road from 2012 to 2018.The results show that nighttime light data can effectively assess the development status of countries along the Belt and Road,and the estimation accuracy of GDP,electric power consumption and carbon emissions reaches 92.31%,96.72%,and 84.11%,respectively.Among them,the regions with rapid development are mainly concentrated in the east and south of the Belt and Road and are mainly countries with relatively low levels of development.On the whole,the distribution of the center of gravity of the development indicators along the Belt and Road between 2012 and 2018 shows a reciprocating fluctuation in the “Southeast-Northwest” direction and an overall migration trend toward the Southeast.(3)Assess the comprehensive development level of countries along the Belt and Road.The study combined nighttime light data and social development parameters to try to explore the comprehensive development levels of countries along the Belt and Road in 2012-2017.The results show that the method proposed in this study can effectively evaluate the comprehensive development status of the countries along the Belt and Road,the overall assessment accuracy is above 94%,and the assessment results are highly robust.The overall development level of most countries along the Belt and Road has gradually increased over the years.Among them,Central and Eastern Europe and Western Asia have a higher degree of development,but the growing volume and growth rate are lower,while the opposite is true in South and Southeast Asia.Based on the NPP-VIIRS nighttime light remote sensing data,a multi-period VIIRS nighttime light data robust denoising method was proposed in this study.Combined with key development indicators,a long-term sequence analysis model for the economic development of countries along the Belt and Road was developed.In addition,Combined with the social development indicators,the evaluation methods of the comprehensive development levels of the countries along the Belt and Road were explored.Eventually formed a long-term sequence monitoring framework for the development of countries along the Belt and Road based on nighttime light data and supplemented by statistical data.It can provide multi-directional decision support for the sustainable development of countries along the Belt and Road.