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Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) systems produce high-resolution images of the seabed environment. Moreover, deep learning has demonstrated superior ability in finding robust features for automating imagery analysis. However, the success of deep learning is conditioned on having lots of labeled training data but obtaining generous pixel-level annotations of SAS imagery is often practically infeasible. This challenge has thus far limited the adoption of deep learning methods for SAS segmentation. Algorithms exist to segment SAS imagery in an unsupervised manner, but they lack the benefit of state-of-the-art learning methods and the results present significant room for improvement. In view of the above, we propose a new iterative algorithm for unsupervised SAS image segmentation combining superpixel formation, deep learning, and traditional clustering methods. We call our method iterative deep unsupervised segmentation (IDUS). IDUS is an unsupervised learning framework that can be divided into four main steps: 1) a deep network estimates class assignments; 2) low-level image features from the deep network are clustered into superpixels; 3) superpixels are clustered into class assignments (which we call pseudo-labels) using $k$ -means; and 4) resulting pseudo-labels are used for loss backpropagation of the deep network prediction. These four steps are performed iteratively until convergence. A comparison of IDUS to current state-of-the-art methods on a realistic benchmark dataset for SAS image segmentation demonstrates the benefits of our proposal even as the IDUS incurs a much lower computational burden during inference (actual labeling of a test image). Because our design combines merits of classical superpixel methods with deep learning, practically we demonstrate a very significant benefit in terms of reduced selection bias, i.e., IDUS shows markedly improved robustness against the choice of training images. Finally, we also develop a semi-supervised (SS) extension of IDUS called Iterative Deep SS Segmentation (IDSS) and demonstrate experimentally that it can further enhance performance while outperforming supervised alternatives that exploit the same labeled training imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, 2-D multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm was applied to map lighting propagation with improved quality. However, the quality is improved at the cost of increasing the calculation load. To improve the efficiency, this article proposes an improved MUSIC-based lightning mapping algorithm, which transforms the 2-D direction of arrival (DOA) estimation problem for an L-shaped array into 1-D DOA estimation problem for the two arms of the array. Additionally, the lightning mapping array is arranged in a nonuniform way to reduce the risk of trivial ambiguity problem. The performance of the developed lightning mapping system is verified with numerical Monte Carlo simulation and further with real lightning observation results. The simulation results show that the nonuniform array outperforms the uniform array in terms of detection accuracy, spatial resolution, and antiambiguity. The observation results show that the MUSIC-based methods produce better lightning mapping quality compared with the interferometry method (15 777 sources mapped), due to better robustness for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) lightning very high-frequency (VHF) signals. Compared with the 2-D MUSIC method (34 620 sources mapped), the proposed low computational cost method (30 461 sources mapped) is proven to produce fairly similar path of lightning leader with significant lower computational cost. Specifically, the proposed method saves about 84.91% of calculation time compared with the 2-D MUSIC method in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buildings serve as the main places of human activities, and it is essential to automatically extract each building instance for a wide range of applications. Recently, automatic building segmentation approaches have made great progress in both detection and segmentation accuracy due to the rapid development of deep learning. However, these approaches struggle to delineate regular and accurate building boundaries due to the limitations in inferring overall structure of the building instance; this might lead to inconsistency in building geometry and difficulty in being applied directly to practical engineering. To tackle this challenge, this article presents an adaptive polygon generation algorithm (APGA), a novel method that aims at directly generating a polygonal output, parameterized as a sequence of building vertices, to outline each building instance. To achieve this, APGA predicts the candidate locations of building vertices and determines the arrangement of these vertices with the help of the position and orientation of the building boundary. Moreover, to introduce local context features and achieve improved performance of the predicted building polygon, APGA integrates finer structures around the candidate vertices to refine their positions. Experiments on several challenging building extraction datasets demonstrated that APGA outperformed state-of-the-art methods in terms of building coverage and geometric similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the large amount of spatial and spectral information contained in hyperspectral image (HSI), feature description of HSI has attracted widespread concern in recent years. Existing deep learning-based HSI feature description algorithms require a large number of training samples and have poor interpretability. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient HSI features description algorithm with interpretability based on machine learning. Local binary pattern (LBP) is a classical descriptor used to extract the local spatial texture features of images, which has been widely applied to image feature description and matching. However, the existing LBP algorithms for HSI are based on the single-dimensional description, which leads to the limitations on the expression of spatial–spectral information. Therefore, a multidimensional LBP (MDLBP) based on Clifford algebra for HSI is proposed in this article, which is able to extract spatial–spectral feature from multiple dimensions. First, with the theory of the Clifford algebra, a new representation of HSI including spatial and spectral information is built. Second, the geometric relationship between the local geometry of HSI in Clifford algebra space is calculated to realize the local multidimensional description of the local spatial–spectral information. Finally, a novel LBP coding algorithm for HSI is implemented based on the local multidimensional description to calculate the feature descriptor of HSI. The experimental results on HSI classification show that our proposed MDLBP algorithm can achieve higher accuracy than the representative spatial–spectral features and the existing LBP algorithms, especially in the scenery of small-scale training samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]