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In Positron Emission Tomography (PET), the coincident emission of gamma photon pairs constitutes the useful signals that should be detected and processed to reconstruct the desired PET images of the studied objects. However, along with the useful signal, noise is also generated and added to the detected signals that are sorted with respect to their line-ofresponse and arranged as a sinogram for each two-dimensional slice. In this paper, the type and properties of noise in PET sinogram data will be evaluated. Furthermore, the effect of the used linear and non-linear image denoising and reconstruction procedures on the type of noise will be analyzed. For this purpose, the Gaussian filter, the Median filter, the Patch Confidence k-Nearest Neighbor filter (PCkNN) and the Block Matching 3D filter (BM3D) were used to denoise PET image data, as well as the maximum likelihood expectation maximization algorithm (MLEM) and the Filtered Back Projection algorithm (FBP) to reconstruct the PET images.

This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of using instantaneous multichannel two-dimensional (2D) imaging to achieve instantaneous 2D imaging spectroscopy. A simulated multiple-filter mosaic was introduced and used to acquire multichannel data which were transformed into spectra. The feasibility of two different transformation approaches (the concrete pseudoinverse approach and a statistical approach) was investigated through extensive experimental tasks. A promising statistical method was identified to be used for accurate estimation of spectra from multichannel data. Comparison between estimated and measured spectra shows that higher estimation accuracy can be achieved when using a larger number of usable multiple-filter combinations in the mosaic.

Many studies have shown the usefulness of hyperspectral crop reflectance data for detecting plant pathological stress. However, there is still a need to identify unique signatures for specific stresses amidst the constantly changing background associated with normal crop growth and development. Comparing spatial and temporal patterns in crop spectra can provide such signatures. This work was concerned with characterising and estimating fungal disease severity in a spring wheat crop. This goal can be accomplished by using a reference data set consisting of hyperspectral crop reflectance data vectors and the corresponding disease severity field assessments. The hyperspectral vectors were first normalised into zero-mean and unit-variance vectors by performing various combinations of spectral- and band-wise normalisations. Then, after applying the same normalisation procedures to the new hyperspectral data, a nearest-neighbour classifier was used to classify the new data against the reference data. Finally, the corresponding stress signatures were computed using a linear transformation model. High correlation was obtained between the classification results and the corresponding field assessments of fungal disease severity, confirming the usefulness and efficiency of this approach. The effects of increased disease severity could be characterised by analysing the resulting disease signatures obtained when applying the different normalisation procedures. The low computational load of this approach makes it suitable for real-time on-vehicle applications.

A new more efficient variant of a recently developed algorithm for unsupervised fuzzy clustering is introduced. A Weighted Incremental Neural Network (WINN) is introduced and used for this purpose. The new approach is called FC-WINN (Fuzzy Clustering using WINN). The WINN algorithm produces a net of nodes connected by edges, which reflects and preserves the topology of the input data set. Additional weights, which are proportional to the local densities in input space, are associated with the resulting nodes and edges to store useful information about the topological relations in the given input data set. A fuzziness factor, proportional to the connectedness of the net, is introduced in the system. A watershed-like procedure is used to cluster the resulting net. The number of the resulting clusters is determined by this procedure. Only two parameters must be chosen by the user for the FC-WINN algorithm to determine the resolution and the connectedness of the net. Other parameters that must be specified are those which are necessary for the used incremental neural network, which is a modified version of the Growing Neural Gas algorithm (GNG). The FC-WINN algorithm is computationally efficient when compared to other approaches for clustering large high-dimensional data sets.

It has been found, through many research works, that hyperspectral reflectance data can be used for studying the pathological conditions of crops. The influence of the pathological status of a crop on its spectral characteristics can be visible or detectable in the visible and/or the near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, depending on the spectral effects of the pathological conditions of the crop. Differences in the spectral characteristics between normal (i.e. healthy) crops and others suffering from physiological stress or disease, can be revealed and/or magnified by simply normalising the data properly. Such effects can be achieved by normalising the hyperspectral reflectance data into zero-mean and unit variance vectors (i.e. whitening the data). Spectral-wise and/or band-wise normalisation can be performed here. In the experimental part of this work we used a reference data set consisting of hyperspectral reflectance data vectors and the corresponding field measurements of leaf-damage level in the plants. Then, after normalising the new hyperspectral reflectance data; a nearest neighbour classifier is used to classify our new data against the reference data. The correlation coefficient and the sum of squared differences are used as distance measures (between two vectors) in the nearest neighbour classifier. High correlation is obtained between the classification results and the corresponding field leaf-damage measurements, confirming the usefulness and efficiency of this method for this type of analysis.