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Hyperspectral change detection (HCD) is widely applied in various domains, such as accurate agriculture, disaster assessment, land use, and environmental monitoring. Most HCD methods aim at extracting and classifying the spectral variation features with dimension reduction and machine-learning methods. Different from previous work, this letter proposes an edge-guided HCD method. Specifically, a subtraction operation is adopted to extract difference hyperspectral image (HSI). Then, the edge-preserving filtering is performed on the difference HSI to extract spectral–spatial features. Next, the number of the extracted features is diminished through the kernel principal component analysis (PCA). Finally, the fused features are input into a spectral classifier followed by the edge-preserving filtering to obtain the final change detection result. Experiments on several HCD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can consistently outperform other advanced approaches in both subjective and objective evaluations when only a limited number of labeled samples are available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing image super-resolution (SR) aims to boost the image resolution while recovering rich high-frequency details. Currently, most of the SR methods are based on an assumption that the degradation kernel is a specific downsampler. However, the degradation kernel is unknown and sophisticated for real remote sensing scenes, leading to a severe performance drop. To alleviate this problem, we propose a multilayer degradation representation-guided blind SR method for remote sensing images, which mainly consists of three key steps. First, an unsupervised representation learning is exploited to learn the degradation representation from low-resolution images. Then, a degradation-guided deep residual module is designed to model high-order features across different scales from the original images. Finally, a multilayer degradation-aware feature fusion mechanism is proposed to restore the finer details. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve promising performance with respect to other state-of-the-art SR approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hyperspectral feature extraction technique is one of the most popular topics in the remote sensing community. However, most hyperspectral feature extraction methods are based on region-based local information descriptors while neglecting the correlation and dependencies of different homogeneous regions. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a multi-view structural feature extraction method to furnish a complete characterization for spectral–spatial structures of different objects, which mainly is made up of the following key steps. First, the spectral number of the original image is reduced with the minimum noise fraction (MNF) method, and a relative total variation is exploited to extract the local structural feature from the dimension reduced data. Then, with the help of a superpixel segmentation technique, the nonlocal structural features from intra-view and inter-view are constructed by considering the intra- and inter-similarities of superpixels. Finally, the local and nonlocal structural features are merged together to form the final image features for classification. Experiments on several real hyperspectral datasets indicate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art classification methods in terms of visual performance and objective results, especially when the number of training set is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most deep metric learning-based image characterization methods exploit supervised information to model the semantic relations among the remote sensing (RS) scenes. Nonetheless, the unprecedented availability of large-scale RS data makes the annotation of such images very challenging, requiring automated supportive processes. Whether the annotation is assisted by aggregation or crowd-sourcing, the RS large-variance problem, together with other important factors [e.g., geo-location/registration errors, land-cover changes, even low-quality Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), etc.] often introduce the so-called label noise, i.e., semantic annotation errors. In this article, we first investigate the deep metric learning-based characterization of RS images with label noise and propose a novel loss formulation, named robust normalized softmax loss (RNSL), for robustly learning the metrics among RS scenes. Specifically, our RNSL improves the robustness of the normalized softmax loss (NSL), commonly utilized for deep metric learning, by replacing its logarithmic function with the negative Box–Cox transformation in order to down-weight the contributions from noisy images on the learning of the corresponding class prototypes. Moreover, by truncating the loss with a certain threshold, we also propose a truncated robust normalized softmax loss (t-RNSL) which can further enforce the learning of class prototypes based on the image features with high similarities between them, so that the intraclass features can be well grouped and interclass features can be well separated. Our experiments, conducted on two benchmark RS data sets, validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with respect to different state-of-the-art methods in three different downstream applications (classification, clustering, and retrieval). The codes of this article will be publicly available from https://github.com/jiankang1991. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success when characterizing remote sensing (RS) images. However, the lack of sufficient annotated data (together with the high complexity of the RS image domain) often makes supervised and transfer learning schemes limited from an operational perspective. Despite the fact that unsupervised methods can potentially relieve these limitations, they are frequently unable to effectively exploit relevant prior knowledge about the RS domain, which may eventually constrain their final performance. In order to address these challenges, this article presents a new unsupervised deep metric learning model, called spatially augmented momentum contrast (SauMoCo), which has been specially designed to characterize unlabeled RS scenes. Based on the first law of geography, the proposed approach defines spatial augmentation criteria to uncover semantic relationships among land cover tiles. Then, a queue of deep embeddings is constructed to enhance the semantic variety of RS tiles within the considered contrastive learning process, where an auxiliary CNN model serves as an updating mechanism. Our experimental comparison, including different state-of-the-art techniques and benchmark RS image archives, reveals that the proposed approach obtains remarkable performance gains when characterizing unlabeled scenes since it is able to substantially enhance the discrimination ability among complex land cover categories. The source codes of this article will be made available to the RS community for reproducible research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]