Spatial Sciences Undergraduate Degree Program

Hongxing Liu's research interests primarily lie in remote sensing, GIS and their applications to environmental and urban studies. His recent research projects have been funded by NSF, NASA, and NOAA Sea Grant programs. With the support of a NASA grant, he developed an automated image processing method for extracting shorelines from satellite imagery. He derived a complete high-resolution coastline map for Antartica based on Radarsat SAR imagery and a shoreline for the Texas Gulf coast based on the Landsat ETM+ imagery.

Using the interferometric SAR (InSAR) technique, he has been analyzing glacial dynamics and mass balance in Lambert Glacial Basin with the support of a NSF grant. Based on the time series of satellite images and population census data, he has been analyzing the urban morphology and historic sprawl in the Houston metropolitan area.

He is also exploring the methodology for constructing and visualizing 3D urban models by integrating LIDAR, aerial photographs, and high resolution satellite imagery. By fusing airborne LIDAR, NEXRAD, and satellite imagery, he has been constructing hydrologic and hydraulic models for simulating and predicting flood hazards in low-lying coastal plains. With the support of Sea Grant program, he will investigate coastal dynamics in the upper Texas Gulf coast.

He is also interested in methodological issues in GIS and remote sensing. He has developed various algorithms and software tools for spatial interpolation, object oriented image analysis, image segmentation and classification, image matching, locally weighted regression analysis, dasymetric mapping, and spatia-temporal analysis.