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Linear spectral unmixing is the practice of decomposing the mixed pixel into a linear combination of the constituent endmembers and the estimated abundances. This paper focuses on unsupervised spectral unmixing where the endmembers are unknown a priori. Conventional approaches use either geometrical- or statistical-based approaches. In this paper, we address the challenges of spectral unmixing with unsupervised deep learning models, in specific, the autoencoder models, where the decoder serves as the endmembers and the hidden layer output serves as the abundances. In several recent attempts, part-based autoencoders have been designed to solve the unsupervised spectral unmixing problem. However, the performance has not been satisfactory. In this paper, we first discuss some important findings we make on issues with part-based autoencoders. By proof of counterexample, we show that all existing part-based autoencoder networks with nonnegative and tied encoder and decoder are inherently defective by making these inappropriate assumptions on the network structure. As a result, they are not suitable for solving the spectral unmixing problem. We propose a so-called untied denoising autoencoder with sparsity, in which the encoder and decoder of the network are independent, and only the decoder of the network is enforced to be nonnegative. Furthermore, we make two critical additions to the network design. First, since denoising is an essential step for spectral unmixing, we propose to incorporate the denoising capacity into the network optimization in the format of a denoising constraint rather than cascading another denoising preprocessor in order to avoid the introduction of additional reconstruction error. Second, to be more robust to the inaccurate estimation of a number of endmembers, we adopt an $l_{21}$ -norm on the encoder of the network to reduce the redundant endmembers while decreasing the reconstruction error simultaneously. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, especially for highly noisy data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, multifeature learning in collaborative representation classification (CRC) for hyperspectral images has generated promising performance. In this paper, two novel multifeature learning algorithms that update dictionary directly and indirectly are proposed. In order to offer the complementarity of multifeature, four different types of features—global feature (i.e., Gabor feature), local feature (i.e., local binary pattern), shape feature (i.e., extended multiattribute profiles), and spectral feature—are adopted in this paper. Under the hypothesis that most of the features should share the same coding pattern in CRC, this paper proposes to learn proper dictionaries for each feature until obtaining stable codes in a linear classifier. Furthermore, to avoid the explicit mapping of infinite-dimensional dictionaries in a nonlinear kernelized classifier, an indirect approach to construct the transformation matrix from original dictionaries to learn new dictionaries is developed. Three real hyperspectral images acquired from different sensors are adopted for performance evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can provide superior performance compared with those of the state-of-the-art classifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supervised approaches classify input data using a set of representative samples for each class, known as training samples. The collection of such samples is expensive and time demanding. Hence, unsupervised feature learning, which has a quick access to arbitrary amounts of unlabeled data, is conceptually of high interest. In this paper, we propose a novel network architecture, fully Conv-Deconv network, for unsupervised spectral-spatial feature learning of hyperspectral images, which is able to be trained in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, our network is based on the so-called encoder-decoder paradigm, i.e., the input 3-D hyperspectral patch is first transformed into a typically lower dimensional space via a convolutional subnetwork (encoder), and then expanded to reproduce the initial data by a deconvolutional subnetwork (decoder). However, during the experiment, we found that such a network is not easy to be optimized. To address this problem, we refine the proposed network architecture by incorporating: 1) residual learning and 2) a new unpooling operation that can use memorized max-pooling indexes. Moreover, to understand the "black box," we make an in-depth study of the learned feature maps in the experimental analysis. A very interesting discovery is that some specific "neurons" in the first residual block of the proposed network own good description power for semantic visual patterns in the object level, which provide an opportunity to achieve "free" object detection. This paper, for the first time in the remote sensing community, proposes an end-to-end fully Conv-Deconv network for unsupervised spectral-spatial feature learning. Moreover, this paper also introduces an in-depth investigation of learned features. Experimental results on two widely used hyperspectral data, Indian Pines and Pavia University, demonstrate competitive performance obtained by the proposed methodology compared with other studied approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automatic detection of buried threats in ground penetrating radar (GPR) data is an active area of research due to GPR's ability to detect both metal and nonmetal subsurface objects. Recent work on algorithms designed to distinguish between threats and nonthreats in GPR data has utilized computer vision methods to advance the state-of-the-art detection and discrimination performance. Feature extractors, or descriptors, from the computer vision literature have exhibited excellent performance in representing 2-D GPR image patches and allow for robust classification of threats from nonthreats. This paper aims to perform a broad study of feature extraction methods in order to identify characteristics that lead to improved classification performance under controlled conditions. The results presented in this paper show that gradient-based features, such as the edge histogram descriptor and the scale invariant feature transform, provide the most robust performance across a large and varied data set. These results indicate that various techniques from the computer vision literature can be successfully applied to target detection in GPR data and that more advanced techniques from the computer vision literature may provide further performance improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses an image processing architecture and tools to address the problem of ship detection in synthetic-aperture radar images. The detection strategy relies on a tree-based representation of images, here a Maxtree, and graph signal processing tools. Radiometric as well as geometric attributes are evaluated and associated with the Maxtree nodes. They form graph attribute signals which are processed with graph filters. The goal of this filtering step is to exploit the correlation existing between attribute values on neighboring tree nodes. Considering that trees are specific graphs where the connectivity toward ancestors and descendants may have a different meaning, we analyze several linear, nonlinear, and morphological filtering strategies. Beside graph filters, two new filtering notions emerge from this analysis: tree and branch filters. Finally, we discuss a ship detection architecture that involves graph signal filters and machine learning tools. This architecture demonstrates the interest of applying graph signal processing tools on the tree-based representation of images and of going beyond classical graph filters. The resulting approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, a MATLAB toolbox allowing users to experiment with the tools discussed in this paper on Maxtree or Mintree has been created and made public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scene classification of remote sensing images has drawn great attention because of its wide applications. In this paper, with the guidance of the human visual system (HVS), we explore the attention mechanism and propose a novel end-to-end attention recurrent convolutional network (ARCNet) for scene classification. It can learn to focus selectively on some key regions or locations and just process them at high-level features, thereby discarding the noncritical information and promoting the classification performance. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we design a novel recurrent attention structure to squeeze high-level semantic and spatial features into several simplex vectors for the reduction of learning parameters. Second, an end-to-end network named ARCNet is proposed to adaptively select a series of attention regions and then to generate powerful predictions by learning to process them sequentially. Third, we construct a new data set named OPTIMAL-31, which contains more categories than popular data sets and gives researchers an extra platform to validate their algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our model makes great promotion in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) is the next generation of European meteorological geostationary satellites, set to be launched in 2021. Besides ensuring continuity with Meteosat Second Generation imagery mission, the new series will feature new instruments, such as the Lightning Imager (LI), a high-speed optical detector providing near real-time lightning detection capabilities over Europe and Africa. The instrument will register events on pixels, where a lightning pulse generates a transient in the acquired radiance. In parallel, signal variations due to a number of unwanted sources, e.g., acquisition noise or jitter movement, are expected to produce false events. The challenge for on-board and on-ground processing is, thus, to discard as many false events as possible while keeping a majority of the true lightning events. This paper discusses a chain of algorithms that can be used by the LI for the detection of lightning and for the filtering of false events. Some of these algorithms have been developed in the framework of internal research and simulations conducted by the MTG team at the European Space Agency on an in-house LI simulator and therefore will not necessarily reflect the ultimate operational processing chain. The application of the chain on a representative scenario shows that 99.5% of the false events can be eliminated while keeping 83.6% of the true events, before generating the LI higher level data products. Machine learning techniques have also been studied as an alternative for on-ground event processing, and preliminary results indicate promising potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary surveillance systems mainly use video cameras as their primary sensor. However, video cameras possess fundamental deficiencies, such as the inability to handle low-light environments, poor weather conditions, and concealing clothing. In contrast, radar devices are able to sense in pitch-dark environments and to see through walls. In this paper, we investigate the use of micro-Doppler (MD) signatures retrieved from a low-power radar device to identify a set of persons based on their gait characteristics. To that end, we propose a robust feature learning approach based on deep convolutional neural networks. Given that we aim at providing a solution for a real-world problem, people are allowed to walk around freely in two different rooms. In this setting, the IDentification with Radar data data set is constructed and published, consisting of 150 min of annotated MD data equally spread over five targets. Through experiments, we investigate the effectiveness of both the Doppler and time dimension, showing that our approach achieves a classification error rate of 24.70% on the validation set and 21.54% on the test set for the five targets used. When experimenting with larger time windows, we are able to further lower the error rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been growing interest in using precipitable water vapor (PWV) derived from global positioning system (GPS) signal delays to predict rainfall. However, the occurrence of rainfall is dependent on a myriad of atmospheric parameters. This paper proposes a systematic approach to analyze various parameters that affect precipitation in the atmosphere. Different ground-based weather features such as Temperature, Relative Humidity, Dew Point, Solar Radiation, PWV along with Seasonal and Diurnal variables are identified, and a detailed feature correlation study is presented. While all features play a significant role in rainfall classification, only a few of them, such as PWV, Solar Radiation, Seasonal, and Diurnal features, stand out for rainfall prediction. Based on these findings, an optimum set of features are used in a data-driven machine learning algorithm for rainfall prediction. The experimental evaluation using a 4-year (2012–2015) database shows a true detection rate of 80.4%, a false alarm rate of 20.3%, and an overall accuracy of 79.6%. Compared to the existing literature, our method significantly reduces the false alarm rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time-consuming modeling of physical remote sensing models restricts their application to parameter estimation from satellite observations. Machine learning techniques have become highly developed in recent years and show good capacity for model fitting. Based on our previously developed coupled soil–canopy–atmosphere radiative transfer model (RTM) and a multiple parameters estimation scheme, this paper evaluates the performance of four machine learning algorithms [Gaussian process regression (GPR), back-propagation neural networks (NNs), random forest regression, and general regression NN] on emulating the coupled RTM, where the traditional lookup table (LUT) algorithm is also compared. The results show that the GPR algorithm can emulate complex RTMs with excellent accuracy and efficiency. GPR emulators of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), fraction of absorbed PAR, and incident shortwave radiation were applied to the multi-parameter estimation scheme to replace the traditional LUT algorithm, which avoids the need to integrate over the spectra while achieving an acceleration ratio of 16. A test of the updated multi-parameter estimation scheme at the Bondville site using 18 years of clear-sky observations demonstrates that replacing the computationally expensive integration processes with GPR emulators is practical. The emulators can also be used to simulate the corresponding parameters independently, and this GPR acceleration method for complex models is universal and can be easily applied to other time-consuming models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study self-taught learning for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. Supervised deep learning methods are currently state of the art for many machine learning problems, but these methods require large quantities of labeled data to be effective. Unfortunately, existing labeled HSI benchmarks are too small to directly train a deep supervised network. Alternatively, we used self-taught learning, which is an unsupervised method to learn feature extracting frameworks from unlabeled hyperspectral imagery. These models learn how to extract generalizable features by training on sufficiently large quantities of unlabeled data that are distinct from the target data set. Once trained, these models can extract features from smaller labeled target data sets. We studied two self-taught learning frameworks for HSI classification. The first is a shallow approach that uses independent component analysis and the second is a three-layer stacked convolutional autoencoder. Our models are applied to the Indian Pines, Salinas Valley, and Pavia University data sets, which were captured by two separate sensors at different altitudes. Despite large variation in scene type, our algorithms achieve state-of-the-art results across all the three data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents spiking neural networks (SNNs) for remote sensing spatiotemporal analysis of image time series, which make use of the highly parallel and low-power-consuming neuromorphic hardware platforms possible. This paper illustrates this concept with the introduction of the first SNN computational model for crop yield estimation from normalized difference vegetation index image time series. It presents the development and testing of a methodological framework which utilizes the spatial accumulation of time series of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer 250-m resolution data and historical crop yield data to train an SNN to make timely prediction of crop yield. The research work also includes an analysis on the optimum number of features needed to optimize the results from our experimental data set. The proposed approach was applied to estimate the winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) yield in Shandong province, one of the main winter-wheat-growing regions of China. Our method was able to predict the yield around six weeks before harvest with a very high accuracy. Our methodology provided an average accuracy of 95.64%, with an average error of prediction of 0.236 t/ha and correlation coefficient of 0.801 based on a nine-feature model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Turbulence has been one of the major concerns for aviation safety. This paper applies evolutionary machine learning (ML) technology to turbulence level classification for civil aviation. An artificial neural network ML approach based on radar observation is developed for classifying the cubed root of the Eddy Dissipation Rate (EDR)1/3, an accepted measure of turbulence intensity. The approach is validated using Typhoon weather data collected by Hong Kong Observatory’s Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) located near Hong Kong International Airport and comparing TDWR EDR1/3 detections and predictions with in situ EDR1/3 measured by commercial aircraft. The testing results verified that the ML approach performs reasonably well for both detecting and predicting tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper implements a novel approach to automatically detect and classify rockfalls in Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter narrow angle camera (NAC) images using a single-stage dense object detector (RetinaNet). The convolutional neural network has been trained with a data set of 2932 original rockfall images. In order to avoid overfitting, the initial training data set has been augmented during training using random image rotation, scaling, and flipping. Testing images have been labelled by human operators and have been used for RetinaNet performance evaluation. Testing shows that RetinaNet is capable to reach recall values between 0.98 and 0.39, precision values between 1 and 0.25, and average precisions ranging from 0.89 to 0.69, depending on the used confidence threshold and intersection-over-union values. Mean processing time of a single NAC image in RetinaNet is around 10 s using a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and GeForce Titan Xp, which is in orders of magnitudes faster than a human operator. The processing speed allows to efficiently exploit the currently available NAC data stack with more than 1 million images in a reasonable timeframe. The combination of speed and detection performance can be used to produce lunar rockfall distribution maps on large spatial scales for utilization by the scientific and engineering community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-spectral resolution imaging systems play a critical role in the identification and characterization of objects in a scene of interest. Unfortunately, multiple factors impair spectral resolution, as in the case of modern snapshot spectral imagers that associate each hyperpixel with a specific spectral band. In this paper, we introduce a novel postacquisition computational technique aiming to enhance the spectral dimensionality of imaging systems by exploiting the mathematical frameworks of sparse representations and dictionary learning. We propose a coupled dictionary learning model which considers joint feature spaces, composed of low- and high-spectral resolution hypercubes, in order to achieve spectral superresolution performance. We formulate our spectral coupled dictionary learning optimization problem within the context of the alternating direction method of multipliers, and we manage to update the involved quantities via closed-form expressions. In addition, we consider a realistic spectral subsampling scenario, taking into account the spectral response functions of different satellites. Moreover, we apply our spectral superresolution algorithm on real satellite data acquired by Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 sensors. Finally, we have investigated the problem of hyperspectral image unmixing using the recovered high-spectral resolution data cube, and we are able to demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides significant value in hyperspectral image understanding techniques. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of the proposed approach to synthesize high-spectral-resolution 3-D hypercubes, achieving better performance compared to state-of-the-art resolution enhancement methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a statistical detection theory approach to hyperspectral image (HSI) classification which is quite different from many conventional approaches reported in the HSI classification literature. It translates a multi-target detection problem into a multi-class classification problem so that the well-established statistical detection theory can be readily applicable to solving classification problems. In particular, two types of classification, a priori classification and a posteriori classification, are developed in corresponding to Bayes detection and maximum a posteriori (MAP) detection, respectively, in detection theory. As a result, detection probability and false alarm probability can also be translated to classification rate and false classification rate derived from a confusion classification matrix used for classification. To evaluate the effectiveness of a posteriori classification, a new a posteriori classification measure, to be called precision rate (PR), is also introduced by MAP classification in contrast to overall accuracy (OA) that can be considered as a priori classification measure and has been used for Bayes classification. The experimental results provide evidence that a priori classifier as Bayes classifier which performs well in terms of OA does not necessarily perform well as a posteriori classifier in terms of PR. That is, PR is the only criterion that can be used as a posteriori classification measure to evaluate how well a classifier performs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new anomaly detection method for hyperspectral images based on two well-designed dictionaries: background dictionary and potential anomaly dictionary. In order to effectively detect an anomaly and eliminate the influence of noise, the original image is decomposed into three components: background, anomalies, and noise. In this way, the anomaly detection task is regarded as a problem of matrix decomposition. Considering the homogeneity of background and the sparsity of anomalies, the low-rank and sparse constraints are imposed in our model. Then, the background and potential anomaly dictionaries are constructed using the background and anomaly priors. For the background dictionary, a joint sparse representation (JSR)-based dictionary selection strategy is proposed, assuming that the frequently used atoms in the overcomplete dictionary tend to be the background. In order to make full use of the prior information of anomalies hidden in the scene, the potential anomaly dictionary is constructed. We define a criterion, i.e., the anomalous level of a pixel, by using the residual calculated in the JSR model within its local region. Then, it is combined with a weighted term to alleviate the influence of noise and background. Experiments show that our proposed anomaly detection method based on potential anomaly and background dictionaries construction can achieve superior results compared with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification plays an important role in remote sensing image processing. In recent years, stacked auto-encoder (SAE) has obtained a series of excellent results in PolSAR image classification. The recently proposed projective dictionary pair learning (DPL) model takes both accuracy and time consumption into consideration, and another recently proposed semicoupled dictionary learning (SCDL) model gives a new way to fit different features. Based on the SAE, DPL, and SCDL models, we propose a novel semicoupled projective DPL method with SAE (SAE-SDPL) for PolSAR image classification. Our method can get the classification result efficiently and correctly and meanwhile giving a new method to fit different features. In this paper, three PolSAR images are used to test the performance of SAE-SDPL. Compared with some state-of-the-art methods, our method obtains excellent results in PolSAR image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently exhibited an excellent performance in hyperspectral image classification tasks. However, the straightforward CNN-based network architecture still finds obstacles when effectively exploiting the relationships between hyperspectral imaging (HSI) features in the spectral–spatial domain, which is a key factor to deal with the high level of complexity present in remotely sensed HSI data. Despite the fact that deeper architectures try to mitigate these limitations, they also find challenges with the convergence of the network parameters, which eventually limit the classification performance under highly demanding scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new CNN architecture based on spectral–spatial capsule networks in order to achieve a highly accurate classification of HSIs while significantly reducing the network design complexity. Specifically, based on Hinton’s capsule networks, we develop a CNN model extension that redefines the concept of capsule units to become spectral–spatial units specialized in classifying remotely sensed HSI data. The proposed model is composed by several building blocks, called spectral–spatial capsules, which are able to learn HSI spectral–spatial features considering their corresponding spatial positions in the scene, their associated spectral signatures, and also their possible transformations. Our experiments, conducted using five well-known HSI data sets and several state-of-the-art classification methods, reveal that our HSI classification approach based on spectral–spatial capsules is able to provide competitive advantages in terms of both classification accuracy and computational time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel sparsity-based algorithm for anomaly detection in hyperspectral imagery. The algorithm is based on the concept that a background pixel can be approximately represented as a sparse linear combination of its spatial neighbors while an anomaly pixel cannot if the anomalies are removed from its neighborhood. To be physically meaningful, the sum-to-one and nonnegativity constraints are imposed to abundance vector based on the linear mixture model, and the upper bound constraint on sparsity level is removed for better recovery of the test pixel. First, the proposed method utilizes the redundant background information to automatically remove anomalies from the background dictionary. Then, the reconstruction error obtained by the new background dictionary is directly used for anomaly detection. Moreover, a kernel version of the proposed method is also derived to completely exploit the nonlinear feature of hyperspectral data. An important advantage of the proposed methods is their capability to adaptively model the background even when some anomaly pixels are involved. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three real hyperspectral data sets. It is demonstrated that the proposed detectors achieve a promising detection performance with a relatively low computational cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid increase of remote sensing images in temporal, spectral, and spatial resolutions, it is urgent to develop effective techniques for joint interpretation of spatial-temporal images. Multitype change detection (CD) is a significant research topic in multitemporal remote sensing image analysis, and its core is to effectively measure the difference degree and represent the difference among the multitemporal images. In this paper, we propose a novel difference representation learning (DRL) network and present an unsupervised learning framework for multitype CD task. Deep neural networks work well in representation learning but rely too much on labeled data, while clustering is a widely used classification technique free from supervision. However, the distribution of real remote sensing data is often not very friendly for clustering. To better highlight the changes and distinguish different types of changes, we combine difference measurement, DRL, and unsupervised clustering into a unified model, which can be driven to learn Gaussian-distributed and discriminative difference representations for nonchange and different types of changes. Furthermore, the proposed model is extended into an iterative framework to imitate the bottom-up aggregative clustering procedure, in which similar change types are gradually merged into the same classes. At the same time, the training samples are updated and reused to ensure that it converges to a stable solution. The experimental studies on four pairs of multispectral data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model on multitype CD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simultaneous-source acquisition, breaking the limit of conventional seismic acquisition, is a rapidly evolving research field, due to its advantage in reducing survey time and improving data quality. The benefits of simultaneous-source acquisition are compromised by the intense blending interference. Separating a blended record into a group of individual records, known as “deblending” is one of the most popular solution to the problem. However, the blended records are often corrupted by random noise, which causes difficulties in separation. In an iterative deblending algorithm, the incoherent interference can be simulated and subtracted from the blended record. When the random noise is strong, it is difficult to simulate the incoherent interference. In this paper, we propose a hybrid-sparsity constraint model that applies the dictionary learning into the deblending framework that is based on the sparsity-promoting transform to deal with extremely noisy simultaneous source data. The dictionary learning with fine-tuned adaptation can learn the incoherent interference into atoms and reject random noise. Then, the sparse transform-based framework is implemented to iteratively separate the signal and interference. We use two synthetic examples to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method in extremely noisy situations. Two field examples further confirm the superior deblending performance of the proposed method for the noisy simultaneous-source data over the curvelet transform-based and rank reduction-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at improving the classification accuracy with limited numbers of labeled pixels in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification task, this paper presents a graph-based semisupervised deep learning model for PolSAR image classification. It models the PolSAR image as an undirected graph, where the nodes correspond to the labeled and unlabeled pixels, and the weighted edges represent similarities between the pixels. Upon the graph, we design an energy function incorporating a semisupervision term, a convolutional neural network (CNN) term, and a pairwise smoothness term. The employed CNN extracts abstract and data-driven polarimetric features and outputs class label predictions to the graph model. The semisupervision term enforces the category label constraints on the human-labeled pixels. The pairwise smoothness term encourages class label smoothness and the alignment of class label boundaries with the image edges. Starting from an initialized class label map generated based on $K$ -Wishart distribution hypothesis or superpixel segmentation of PauliRGB images, we iteratively and alternately optimize the defined energy function until it converges. We conducted experiments on two real benchmark PolSAR images, and extensive experiments demonstrated that our approach achieved the state-of-the-art results for PolSAR image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical polarization feature generation using a self-organizing codebook to realize unsupervised land classification that fully utilizes the detailed polarization information contained in high-resolution polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. PolSAR has reached a decimeter-level high resolution. In general, conventional methods lower the resolution of the PolSAR data to 10–20 m in the real-space distance to classify observation regions into land classes such as farm, forest, and town. However, lowering resolution prevents us from discovering new land classes potentially enabled by the resolution enhancement. The hierarchical method we propose here not only classifies observation regions successfully into land classes such as farm, forest, and town that humans can naturally distinguish but also discovers new land subclasses findable only in high-resolution PolSAR data. We explain these two types of our achievements (classification/discovery) through experimental results for Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s polarimetric and interferometric airborne SAR-L2 data having decimeter resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning has recently attracted significant attention in the field of hyperspectral images (HSIs) classification. However, the construction of an efficient deep neural network mostly relies on a large number of labeled samples being available. To address this problem, this paper proposes a unified deep network, combined with active transfer learning (TL) that can be well-trained for HSIs classification using only minimally labeled training data. More specifically, deep joint spectral–spatial feature is first extracted through hierarchical stacked sparse autoencoder (SSAE) networks. Active TL is then exploited to transfer the pretrained SSAE network and the limited training samples from the source domain to the target domain, where the SSAE network is subsequently fine-tuned using the limited labeled samples selected from both source and target domains by the corresponding active learning (AL) strategies. The advantages of our proposed method are threefold: 1) the network can be effectively trained using only limited labeled samples with the help of novel AL strategies; 2) the network is flexible and scalable enough to function across various transfer situations, including cross data set and intraimage; and 3) the learned deep joint spectral–spatial feature representation is more generic and robust than many joint spectral–spatial feature representations. Extensive comparative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches, including both traditional and deep network-based methods, on three popular data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing image scene classification is a fundamental problem, which aims to label an image with a specific semantic category automatically. Recently, deep learning methods have achieved competitive performance for remote sensing image scene classification, especially the methods based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). However, most of the existing CNN methods only use feature vectors of the last fully connected layer. They give more importance to global information and ignore local information of images. It is common that some images belong to different categories, although they own similar global features. The reason is that the category of an image may be highly related to local features, other than the global feature. To address this problem, a method based on rearranged local features is proposed in this paper. First, outputs of the last convolutional layer and the last fully connected layer are employed to depict the local and global information, respectively. After that, the remote sensing images are clustered to several collections using their global features. For each collection, local features of an image are rearranged according to their similarities with local features of the cluster center. In addition, a fusion strategy is proposed to combine global and local features for enhancing the image representation. The proposed method surpasses the state of the arts on four public and challenging data sets: UC-Merced, WHU-RS19, Sydney, and AID. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satellite images are widely applied in humanitarian mapping that labels buildings, roads, and so on for humanitarian aid and economic development. However, the labeling now is mostly done by volunteers. In this paper, we utilize deep learning to solve humanitarian mapping tasks of a mobile software named MapSwipe. The current deep learning techniques, e.g., convolutional neural network (CNN), can recognize ground objects from satellite images but rely on numerous labels for training for each specific task. We solve this problem by fusing multiple freely accessible crowdsourced geographic data and propose an active learning-based CNN training framework named MC-CNN to deal with the quality issues of the labels extracted from these data, including incompleteness (e.g., some kinds of object are not labeled) and heterogeneity (e.g., different spatial granularities). The method is evaluated with building mapping in South Malawi and road mapping in Guinea with level-18 satellite images provided by Bing Map and volunteered geographic information from OpenStreetMap, MapSwipe, and OsmAnd. The results based on multiple metrics, including Precision, Recall, F1 Score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, show that MC-CNN can fuse the crowdsourced labels for higher prediction performance and be successfully applied in MapSwipe for humanitarian mapping with 85% labor saved and an overall accuracy of 0.86 achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-spatial hyperspectral (HH) image reconstruction using both high-spatial multispectral (HM) image and low-spatial hyperspectral (LH) image over the same scene is widely used in many real applications. Nevertheless, the pair of HM image and LH image over the same scene is hard to obtain. To solve this problem, a new HH image reconstruction method using spectral library-based dictionary learning (named as HIRSL) is proposed in this paper, only from one HM image. The above reconstruction problem is formulated in the framework of sparse representation, as an estimation of the band matching matrix, the spectral dictionary, and the sparse coefficients. More specifically, a band matching method is proposed for mapping the common spectral library to a specific spectral library corresponding to the reconstructed HH image in spectral domain. Then, an efficient spectral dictionary learning method is proposed for the construction of spectral dictionary using the matched specific spectral library, which avoids the dependence of the LH image over the same scene. Finally, the sparse coefficients of the HM image with respect to the learned spectral dictionary are estimated using the alternating direction method of multipliers without nonnegative constraint. Comparison results on simulated and real data sets with the relative state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that even only using one HM image, our proposed method achieves a comparable reconstruction quality of high-spatial hyperspectral image both in spatial and spectral domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a self-paced joint sparse representation (SPJSR) model is proposed for the classification of hyperspectral images (HSIs). It replaces the least-squares (LS) loss in the standard joint sparse representation (JSR) model with a weighted LS loss and adopts a self-paced learning (SPL) strategy to learn the weights for neighboring pixels. Rather than predefining a weight vector in the existing weighted JSR methods, both the weight and sparse representation (SR) coefficient associated with neighboring pixels are optimized by an alternating iterative strategy. According to the nature of SPL, in each iteration, neighboring pixels with nonzero weights (i.e., easy pixels) are included for the joint SR of a testing pixel. With the increase of iterations, the model size (i.e., the number of selected neighboring pixels) is enlarged and more neighboring pixels from easy to complex are gradually added into the JSR learning process. After several iterations, the algorithm can be terminated to produce a desirable model that includes easy homogeneous pixels and excludes complex inhomogeneous pixels. Experimental results on two benchmark hyperspectral data sets demonstrate that our proposed SPJSR is more accurate and robust than existing JSR methods, especially in the case of heavy noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, which aims to assign an accurate label for hyperspectral pixels, has drawn great interest in recent years. Although low-rank representation (LRR) has been used to classify HSI, its ability to segment each class from the whole HSI data has not been exploited fully yet. LRR has a good capacity to capture the underlying low-dimensional subspaces embedded in original data. However, there are still two drawbacks for LRR. First, the LRR does not consider the local geometric structure within data, which makes the local correlation among neighboring data easily ignored. Second, the representation obtained by solving LRR is not discriminative enough to separate different data. In this paper, a novel locality- and structure-regularized LRR (LSLRR) model is proposed for HSI classification. To overcome the above-mentioned limitations, we present locality constraint criterion and structure preserving strategy to improve the classical LRR. Specifically, we introduce a new distance metric, which combines both spatial and spectral features, to explore the local similarity of pixels. Thus, the global and local structures of HSI data can be exploited sufficiently. In addition, we propose a structural constraint to make the representation have a near-block-diagonal structure. This helps to determine the final classification labels directly. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three popular HSI data sets. And the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LSLRR outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) exhibit good performance in image processing tasks, pointing themselves as the current state-of-the-art of deep learning methods. However, the intrinsic complexity of remotely sensed hyperspectral images still limits the performance of many CNN models. The high dimensionality of the HSI data, together with the underlying redundancy and noise, often makes the standard CNN approaches unable to generalize discriminative spectral–spatial features. Moreover, deeper CNN architectures also find challenges when additional layers are added, which hampers the network convergence and produces low classification accuracies. In order to mitigate these issues, this paper presents a new deep CNN architecture specially designed for the HSI data. Our new model pursues to improve the spectral–spatial features uncovered by the convolutional filters of the network. Specifically, the proposed residual-based approach gradually increases the feature map dimension at all convolutional layers, grouped in pyramidal bottleneck residual blocks, in order to involve more locations as the network depth increases while balancing the workload among all units, preserving the time complexity per layer. It can be seen as a pyramid, where the deeper the blocks, the more feature maps can be extracted. Therefore, the diversity of high-level spectral–spatial attributes can be gradually increased across layers to enhance the performance of the proposed network with the HSI data. Our experiments, conducted using four well-known HSI data sets and 10 different classification techniques, reveal that our newly developed HSI pyramidal residual model is able to provide competitive advantages (in terms of both classification accuracy and computational time) over the state-of-the-art HSI classification methods [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present tensor-based linear and nonlinear models for hyperspectral data classification and analysis. By exploiting the principles of tensor algebra, we introduce new classification architectures, the weight parameters of which satisfy the rank-1 canonical decomposition property. Then, we propose learning algorithms to train both linear and nonlinear classifiers. The advantages of the proposed classification approach are that: 1) it significantly reduces the number of weight parameters required to train the model (and thus the respective number of training samples); 2) it provides a physical interpretation of model coefficients on the classification output; and 3) it retains the spatial and spectral coherency of the input samples. The linear tensor-based model exploits the principles of logistic regression, assuming the rank-1 canonical decomposition property among its weights. For the nonlinear classifier, we propose a modification of a feedforward neural network (FNN), called rank-1 FNN, since its weights satisfy again the rank-1 canonical decomposition property. An appropriate learning algorithm is also proposed to train the network. Experimental results and comparisons with state-of-the-art classification methods, either linear (e.g., linear support vector machine) or nonlinear (e.g., deep learning), indicate the outperformance of the proposed scheme, especially in the cases where a small number of training samples is available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Super-resolution (SR) brings an excellent opportunity to improve a wide range of different remote sensing applications. SR techniques are concerned about increasing the image resolution while providing finer spatial details than those captured by the original acquisition instrument. Therefore, SR techniques are particularly useful to cope with the increasing demand remote sensing imaging applications requiring fine spatial resolution. Even though different machine learning paradigms have been successfully applied in SR, more research is required to improve the SR process without the need of external high-resolution (HR) training examples. This paper proposes a new convolutional generator model to super-resolve low-resolution (LR) remote sensing data from an unsupervised perspective. That is, the proposed generative network is able to initially learn relationships between the LR and HR domains throughout several convolutional, downsampling, batch normalization, and activation layers. Then, the data are symmetrically projected to the target resolution while guaranteeing a reconstruction constraint over the LR input image. An experimental comparison is conducted using 12 different unsupervised SR methods over different test images. Our experiments reveal the potential of the proposed approach to improve the resolution of remote sensing imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is an active and important research task driven by many practical applications. To leverage deep learning models especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for HSI classification, this paper proposes a simple yet effective method to extract hierarchical deep spatial feature for HSI classification by exploring the power of off-the-shelf CNN models, without any additional retraining or fine-tuning on the target data set. To obtain better classification accuracy, we further propose a unified metric learning-based framework to alternately learn discriminative spectral–spatial features, which have better representation capability and train support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. To this end, we design a new objective function that explicitly embeds a metric learning regularization term into SVM training. The metric learning regularization term is used to learn a powerful spectral–spatial feature representation by fusing spectral feature and deep spatial feature, which has small intraclass scatter but big between class separation. By transforming HSI data into new spectral–spatial feature space through CNN and metric learning, we can pull the pixels from the same class closer, while pushing the different class pixels farther away. In the experiments, we comprehensively evaluate the proposed method on three commonly used HSI benchmark data sets. State-of-the-art results are achieved when compared with the existing HSI classification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents one feature-based detector to find sea-surface floating small targets. In integration time of the order of seconds, target returns exhibit time-frequency (TF) characteristics different from sea clutter. The normalized smoothed pseudo-Wigner–Ville distribution (SPWVD) is proposed to enhance TF characteristics of target returns, which is computed from the SPWVDs of time series at the cell under test (CUT) and reference cells around the CUT. The differences between target returns and the TF pattern of sea clutter are congregated on the normalized SPWVD. From that the ridge integration (RI) is computed and significant TF points from each time slice form a binary image. The number of connected regions and the maximum size of connected regions in the binary image are extracted and are combined with the RI into a 3-D feature vector. Due to the unavailability of the feature vector samples of radar returns with target, a one-class classifier with a controllable false alarm rate is constructed from the feature vector samples of sea clutter by the fast convex hull learning algorithm. As a result, a new feature-based detector is designed. It is compared with the tri-feature-based detector using amplitude and Doppler features and the fractal-based detector using the Hurst exponent of amplitude time series on the recognized IPIX radar database for floating small target detection. The results show that a significant improvement in detection performance is attained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection is an important task in hyperspectral data analysis. This paper presents a sparse conditional random field (SCRF) model to select relevant features for the classification of hyperspectral images and, meanwhile, to exploit the contextual information in the form of spatial dependences in the images. The sparsity arises from the use of a Laplacian prior on the CRF parameters, which encourages the parameter estimates to be either significantly large or exactly zero. To joint the feature selection and classifier design, this paper develops an efficient sparse training method, which divides the training of SCRF into the sparse trainings of two simpler classifiers. Experiments on the real-world hyperspectral image attest to the accuracy, sparsity, and efficiency of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With regard to quantitative remote sensing products in the visible and infrared ranges, thick clouds and accompanying shadows are an inevitable source of noise. Due to the absence of adequate supporting information from the data themselves, it is a formidable challenge to accurately restore the surficial information underlying large-scale clouds. In this paper, dictionary learning is expanded into the multitemporal recovery of quantitative data contaminated by thick clouds and shadows. This paper proposes two multitemporal dictionary learning algorithms, expanding on their KSVD and Bayesian counterparts. In order to make better use of the temporal correlations, the expanded KSVD algorithm seeks an optimized temporal path, and the expanded Bayesian method adaptively weights the temporal correlations. In the experiments, the proposed algorithms are applied to a reflectance product and a land surface temperature product, and the respective advantages of the two algorithms are investigated. The results show that, from both the qualitative visual effect and the quantitative objective evaluation, the proposed methods are effective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Deep neural networks have been shown to be useful for the classification of hyperspectral images, particularly when a large amount of labeled data is available. However, we may not have enough reference data to train a deep neural network for many practical geospatial image analysis applications. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose to use a deep feature alignment neural network to carry out the domain adaptation, where the labeled data from a supplementary data source can be utilized to improve the classification performance in a domain where otherwise limited labeled data are available. In the proposed model, discriminative features for the source and target domains are first extracted using deep convolutional recurrent neural networks and then aligned with each other layer-by-layer by mapping features from each layer to transformed common subspaces at each layer. Experimental results are presented with two data sets. One of these data sets represents domain adaptation between images acquired at different times, while the other data set represents a very unique and challenging domain adaptation problem, representing source and target images that are acquired using different hyperspectral imagers that collect data from different viewpoints and platforms (a ground-based forward-looking street view of objects acquired at the close range and an aerial hyperspectral image). We demonstrate that the proposed deep learning framework enables the robust classification of the target domain data by leveraging information from the source domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we demonstrated the possibility of performing land use and land cover (LULC) classification over a wide area by an L-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR). In previous studies, there has been scant LULC classification by polarimetric SAR data over a wide area. We used satellite-based SAR data with an area of ca. 320 000 km2 obtained by the Phased Array type L-band SAR (PALSAR)-2 phase array. We performed the LULC classification using full polarimetry (FP), compact polarimetry (CP), and dual polarimetry (DP) data by PALSAR-2 and compared their classification accuracy. Our results show FP to be the most accurate. The CP and the DP have the advantages of large-scale coverage and compact data volume but is slightly less accurate than the FP. To further improve accuracy of the classification process, texture analysis, observation date information, and feature elimination are effective. We determined the classification accuracy for seven classes to be 73.4% (the kappa coefficient is 0.668). We found the rice paddy, forest, grass, and urban areas to be sufficiently accurate (84.5%) for practical application. We compared the obtained classification map with an existing LULC map to grasp the LULC changes induced by a recent disaster and successfully detected the damage areas of the disaster. These results indicate the possibility of large-scale LULC monitoring by an L-band polarimetric SAR, which can acquire images rapidly without being affected by weather. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning has achieved great successes in conventional computer vision tasks. In this paper, we exploit deep learning techniques to address the hyperspectral image classification problem. In contrast to conventional computer vision tasks that only examine the spatial context, our proposed method can exploit both spatial context and spectral correlation to enhance hyperspectral image classification. In particular, we advocate four new deep learning models, namely, 2-D convolutional neural network (2-D-CNN), 3-D-CNN, recurrent 2-D CNN (R-2-D-CNN), and recurrent 3-D-CNN (R-3-D-CNN) for hyperspectral image classification. We conducted rigorous experiments based on six publicly available data sets. Through a comparative evaluation with other state-of-the-art methods, our experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed deep learning models, especially the R-3-D-CNN and the R-2-D-CNN deep learning models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel method based on deformable dictionary learning for detecting the regions of change between multitemporal image pairs. We build on our previous work, which constructed a pair of dictionaries. The main shortcoming of this method was its dependence on a large amount of training data. In practice, there is often a shortage of ground-truthed training images, which limits the expression capability of the resulting dictionaries. This paper overcomes this challenge by incorporating the concept of deformation, wherein each atom of a dictionary is no longer a simple image patch, but instead is a flexible image deformation function. This enables the creation of more expressive dictionaries, capable of generalizing to a far greater variety of image patterns, while using a far smaller amount of ground-truthed images for supervised dictionary training. Deformation similarity is employed for patch matching to find the best set of atoms in the difference image (DI) dictionary for reconstructing image patches for a new input DI. Each such atom can be deformed to achieve a better match, thus extending generality while reducing the number of atoms needed in the dictionary. Multiple deformed atoms are weighted and combined to best reconstruct the input DI patch. Then, the same set of deformations and weights is projected to the corresponding atoms in the CD dictionary to obtain the output change-detection map. Experiments in six realistic synthetic aperture radar data sets demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method in comparison with five other state-of-the-art methods from the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in computer vision and pattern recognition have demonstrated the superiority of deep neural networks using spatial feature representation, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), for image classification. However, any classifier, regardless of its model structure (deep or shallow), involves prediction uncertainty when classifying spatially and spectrally complicated very fine spatial resolution (VFSR) imagery. We propose here to characterize the uncertainty distribution of CNN classification and integrate it into a regional decision fusion to increase classification accuracy. Specifically, a variable precision rough set (VPRS) model is proposed to quantify the uncertainty within CNN classifications of VFSR imagery and partition this uncertainty into positive regions (correct classifications) and nonpositive regions (uncertain or incorrect classifications). Those “more correct” areas were trusted by the CNN, whereas the uncertain areas were rectified by a multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based Markov random field (MLP-MRF) classifier to provide crisp and accurate boundary delineation. The proposed MRF-CNN fusion decision strategy exploited the complementary characteristics of the two classifiers based on VPRS uncertainty description and classification integration. The effectiveness of the MRF-CNN method was tested in both urban and rural areas of southern England as well as semantic labeling data sets. The MRF-CNN consistently outperformed the benchmark MLP, support vector machine, MLP-MRF, CNN, and the baseline methods. This paper provides a regional decision fusion framework within which to gain the advantages of model-based CNN, while overcoming the problem of losing effective resolution and uncertain prediction at object boundaries, which is especially pertinent for complex VFSR image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, a variety of approaches have been enriching the field of remote sensing (RS) image processing and analysis. Unfortunately, existing methods remain limited to the rich spatiospectral content of today’s large data sets. It would seem intriguing to resort to deep learning (DL)-based approaches at this stage with regard to their ability to offer accurate semantic interpretation of the data. However, the specificity introduced by the coexistence of spectral and spatial content in the RS data sets widens the scope of the challenges presented to adapt DL methods to these contexts. Therefore, the aim of this paper is first to explore the performance of DL architectures for the RS hyperspectral data set classification and second to introduce a new 3-D DL approach that enables a joint spectral and spatial information process. A set of 3-D schemes is proposed and evaluated. Experimental results based on well-known hyperspectral data sets demonstrate that the proposed method is able to achieve a better classification rate than state-of-the-art methods with lower computational costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of learning from seismic recordings has been studied for years. There is a growing interest of developing automatic mechanisms for identifying the properties of a seismic event. One main motivation is the ability to have a reliable identification of man-made explosions. The availability of multiple high-dimensional observations has increased the use of machine learning techniques in a variety of fields. In this paper, we propose to use a kernel-fusion-based dimensionality reduction framework for generating meaningful seismic representations from raw data. The proposed method is tested on 2023 events that were recorded in Israel and Jordan. The method achieves promising results in the classification of event type as well as the estimation of the event location. The proposed fusion and dimensionality reduction tools may be applied to other types of geophysical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the umbrella of tensor algebra, this paper proposes a new sparse-coding-based classifier (SCC) for hyperspectral imagery classification (HIC). By utilizing the tensor forms of hyperspectral pixels, we advance a tensor sparse-coding model which preserves as many original spatial constraints of a pixel and its spatial neighbors as possible. Furthermore, to alleviate the classification uncertainty resulted from widely existing mixed pixels, this paper constructs a regularization term for maximizing the likelihood of sparse-coding tensor defined on the posterior class probability. By combining the tensor sparse coding with maximizing likelihood estimation, a hybrid probabilistic SCC with spatial neighbor tensor (HPSCC-SNT) is proposed, which makes the pixels be well represented by the training pixels belonging to the same class. The performance of HPSCC-SNT is evaluated on three real hyperspectral imagery data sets, and the results show that it can achieve accurate and robust HIC results, and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing image scene classification is an active and challenging task driven by many applications. More recently, with the advances of deep learning models especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the performance of remote sensing image scene classification has been significantly improved due to the powerful feature representations learnt through CNNs. Although great success has been obtained so far, the problems of within-class diversity and between-class similarity are still two big challenges. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to learn discriminative CNNs (D-CNNs) to boost the performance of remote sensing image scene classification. Different from the traditional CNN models that minimize only the cross entropy loss, our proposed D-CNN models are trained by optimizing a new discriminative objective function. To this end, apart from minimizing the classification error, we also explicitly impose a metric learning regularization term on the CNN features. The metric learning regularization enforces the D-CNN models to be more discriminative so that, in the new D-CNN feature spaces, the images from the same scene class are mapped closely to each other and the images of different classes are mapped as farther apart as possible. In the experiments, we comprehensively evaluate the proposed method on three publicly available benchmark data sets using three off-the-shelf CNN models. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed D-CNN methods outperform the existing baseline methods and achieve state-of-the-art results on all three data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultrawideband radar with high-range resolution is a promising technology for use in short-range 3-D imaging applications, in which optical cameras are not applicable. One of the most efficient 3-D imaging methods is the range-point migration (RPM) method, which has a definite advantage for the synthetic aperture radar approach in terms of computational burden, high accuracy, and high spatial resolution. However, if an insufficient aperture size or angle is provided, these kinds of methods cannot reconstruct the whole target structure due to the absence of reflection signals from large part of target surface. To expand the 3-D image obtained by RPM, this paper proposes an image expansion method by incorporating the RPM feature and fully polarimetric data-based machine learning approach. Following ellipsoid-based scattering analysis and learning with a neural network, this method expresses the target image as an aggregation of parts of ellipsoids, which significantly expands the original image by the RPM method without sacrificing the reconstruction accuracy. The results of numerical simulation based on 3-D finite-difference time-domain analysis verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, in terms of image-expansion criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a feasible and promising way to utilize deep neural networks to learn and extract valuable features from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images for SAR automatic target recognition (ATR). However, it is too difficult to effectively train the deep neural networks with limited raw SAR images. In this paper, we propose a new approach to do SAR ATR, in which a multiview deep learning framework was employed. Based on the multiview SAR ATR pattern, we first present a flexible mean to generate adequate multiview SAR data, which can guarantee a large amount of inputs for network training without needing many raw SAR images. Then, a unique deep convolutional neural network containing a parallel network topology with multiple inputs is adopted. The features of input SAR images from different views will be learned by the proposed network layer by layer; meanwhile, the learned features from the distinct views are fused in different layers progressively. Therefore, the proposed framework is able to achieve a superior recognition performance, and requires only a small number of raw SAR images for network training samples generation. Experimental results have shown the superiority of the proposed framework based on the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current remote sensing image classification problems have to deal with an unprecedented amount of heterogeneous and complex data sources. Upcoming missions will soon provide large data streams that will make land cover/use classification difficult. Machine-learning classifiers can help at this, and many methods are currently available. A popular kernel classifier is the Gaussian process classifier (GPC), since it approaches the classification problem with a solid probabilistic treatment, thus yielding confidence intervals for the predictions as well as very competitive results to the state-of-theart neural networks and support vector machines. However, its computational cost is prohibitive for large-scale applications, and constitutes the main obstacle precluding wide adoption. This paper tackles this problem by introducing two novel efficient methodologies for GP classification. We first include the standard random Fourier features approximation into GPC, which largely decreases its computational cost and permits large-scale remote sensing image classification. In addition, we propose a model which avoids randomly sampling a number of Fourier frequencies and alternatively learns the optimal ones within a variational Bayes approach. The performance of the proposed methods is illustrated in complex problems of cloud detection from multispectral imagery and infrared sounding data. Excellent empirical results support the proposal in both computational cost and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In remote sensing image classification, active learning aims to learn a good classifier as best as possible by choosing the most valuable (informative and representative) training samples. Multiview is a concept that regards analyzing the same object from multiple different views. Generally, these views show diversity and complementarity of features. In this paper, we propose a new multiview active learning (MVAL) framework for hyperspectral image classification. First, we generate multiple views by extracting different attribute components from the same image data. Specifically, we adopt the multiple morphological component analysis to decompose the original image into multiple pairs of attribute components, including content, coarseness, contrast, and directionality, and the smooth component from each pair is chosen as one single view. Second, we construct two multiview intensity-based query strategies for active learning. On the one hand, we exploit the intensity differences of multiple views along with the samples' uncertainty to choose the most informative candidates. On the other hand, we consider the clustering distribution of all unlabeled samples, and query the most representative candidates in addition to the highly informative ones. Our experiments are performed on four benchmark hyperspectral image data sets. The obtained results show that the proposed MVAL framework can lead to better classification performance than the traditional, single-view active learning schemes. In addition, compared with the conventional disagree-based MVAL scheme, the proposed query selection strategies show competitive classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]