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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]

Hyperspectral Image (HSI) visualization, which aims at displaying as much material information of original images as possible on a trichromatic monitor with natural color, plays an important role in image interpretation and analysis. However, most of the HSI visualization methods only focus on presenting the detail information of a scene without providing natural colors and distinguishing land covers with similar colors. In order to address this problem, this article proposes a multichannel pulse-coupled neural network (MPCNN)-based HSI visualization method, which consists of the following steps. First, the MPCNN is proposed and explored to fuse the original HSI so as to obtain a fused band with rich spatial details. Then, a color mapping scheme is proposed to determine the weights of red, green, and blue (RGB) channels. Finally, the weighted RGB channels are stacked together for visualization. Experiments performed on four hyperspectral data sets demonstrate that the proposed method not only displays the HSI with nature colors but also improves the details in the image. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in terms of both visual effect and objective indexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this letter, a novel edge-preserving filtering based approach is proposed for feature extraction of hyperspectral images, which consists of the following steps. First, the dimension of the hyperspectral image is reduced with an averaging based method. Then, the resulting features are obtained by performing edge-preserving filtering on the dimension reduced image, in which a learned edge detection map serves as one of the major cues in the filtering process. The advantage of the proposed method is that it makes full use of the learned edge information in the feature extraction process, and thus, able to improve the performance with respect to other traditional feature extraction methods. Experiments on two real hyperspectral data sets demonstrate the outstanding performance of the proposed method especially when the number of training samples is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]