Hyperspectral Data Acquisition and Its Application for Face Recognition

Current face recognition systems are rife with serious challenges in uncontrolled conditions: e.g., unrestrained lighting, pose variations, accessories, etc. Hyperspectral imaging (HI) is typically employed to counter many of those challenges, by incorporating the spectral information within different bands. Although numerous methods based on hyperspectral imaging have been developed for face recognition with promising results, three fundamental challenges remain: 1) low signal to noise ratios and low intensity values in the bands of the hyperspectral image specifically near blue bands; 2) high dimensionality of hyperspectral data; and 3) inter-band misalignment (IBM) correlated with subject motion during data acquisition. This dissertation concentrates mainly on addressing the aforementioned challenges in HI. First, to address low quality of the bands of the hyperspectral image, we utilize a custom light source that has more radiant power at shorter wavelengths and properly adjust camera exposure times corresponding to lower transmittance of the filter and lower radiant power of our light source. Second, the high dimensionality of spectral data imposes limitations on numerical analysis. As such, there is an emerging demand for robust data compression techniques with lows of less relevant information to manage real spectral data. To cope with these challenging problems, we describe a reduced-order data modeling technique based on local proper orthogonal decomposition in order to compute low-dimensional models by projecting high-dimensional clusters onto subspaces spanned by local reduced-order bases. Third, we investigate 11 leading alignment approaches to address IBM correlated with subject motion during data acquisition. To overcome the limitations of the considered alignment approaches, we propose an accurate alignment approach ( A3) by incorporating the strengths of point correspondence and a low-rank model. In addition, we develop two qualitative prediction models to assess the alignment quality of hyperspectral images in determining improved alignment among the conducted alignment approaches. Finally, we show that the proposed alignment approach leads to promising improvement on face recognition performance of a probabilistic linear discriminant analysis approach

Remote spectral imaging with simultaneous extraction of 3D topography for historical wall paintings

PRISMS (Portable Remote Imaging System for Multispectral Scanning) is designed for in situ, simultaneous high resolution spectral and 3D topographic imaging of wall paintings and other large surfaces. In particular, it can image at transverse resolutions of tens of microns remotely from distances of tens of metres, making high resolution imaging possible from a fixed position on the ground for areas at heights that is difficult to access. The spectral imaging system is fully automated giving 3D topographic mapping at millimetre accuracy as a by-product of the image focusing process. PRISMS is the first imaging device capable of both 3D mapping and spectral imaging simultaneously without additional distance measuring devices. Examples from applications of PRISMS to wall paintings at a UNESCO site in the Gobi desert are presented to demonstrate the potential of the instrument for large scale 3D spectral imaging, revealing faded writing and material identification

KCRC-LCD: Discriminative Kernel Collaborative Representation with Locality Constrained Dictionary for Visual Categorization

We consider the image classification problem via kernel collaborative representation classification with locality constrained dictionary (KCRC-LCD). Specifically, we propose a kernel collaborative representation classification (KCRC) approach in which kernel method is used to improve the discrimination ability of collaborative representation classification (CRC). We then measure the similarities between the query and atoms in the global dictionary in order to construct a locality constrained dictionary (LCD) for KCRC. In addition, we discuss several similarity measure approaches in LCD and further present a simple yet effective unified similarity measure whose superiority is validated in experiments. There are several appealing aspects associated with LCD. First, LCD can be nicely incorporated under the framework of KCRC. The LCD similarity measure can be kernelized under KCRC, which theoretically links CRC and LCD under the kernel method. Second, KCRC-LCD becomes more scalable to both the training set size and the feature dimension. Example shows that KCRC is able to perfectly classify data with certain distribution, while conventional CRC fails completely. Comprehensive experiments on many public datasets also show that KCRC-LCD is a robust discriminative classifier with both excellent performance and good scalability, being comparable or outperforming many other state-of-the-art approaches

Aerial Vehicle Tracking by Adaptive Fusion of Hyperspectral Likelihood Maps

Hyperspectral cameras can provide unique spectral signatures for consistently distinguishing materials that can be used to solve surveillance tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time hyperspectral likelihood maps-aided tracking method (HLT) inspired by an adaptive hyperspectral sensor. A moving object tracking system generally consists of registration, object detection, and tracking modules. We focus on the target detection part and remove the necessity to build any offline classifiers and tune a large amount of hyperparameters, instead learning a generative target model in an online manner for hyperspectral channels ranging from visible to infrared wavelengths. The key idea is that, our adaptive fusion method can combine likelihood maps from multiple bands of hyperspectral imagery into one single more distinctive representation increasing the margin between mean value of foreground and background pixels in the fused map. Experimental results show that the HLT not only outperforms all established fusion methods but is on par with the current state-of-the-art hyperspectral target tracking frameworks.Comment: Accepted at the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 201

A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Learning in Remote Sensing: Theories, Tools and Challenges for the Community

In recent years, deep learning (DL), a re-branding of neural networks (NNs), has risen to the top in numerous areas, namely computer vision (CV), speech recognition, natural language processing, etc. Whereas remote sensing (RS) possesses a number of unique challenges, primarily related to sensors and applications, inevitably RS draws from many of the same theories as CV; e.g., statistics, fusion, and machine learning, to name a few. This means that the RS community should be aware of, if not at the leading edge of, of advancements like DL. Herein, we provide the most comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art RS DL research. We also review recent new developments in the DL field that can be used in DL for RS. Namely, we focus on theories, tools and challenges for the RS community. Specifically, we focus on unsolved challenges and opportunities as it relates to (i) inadequate data sets, (ii) human-understandable solutions for modelling physical phenomena, (iii) Big Data, (iv) non-traditional heterogeneous data sources, (v) DL architectures and learning algorithms for spectral, spatial and temporal data, (vi) transfer learning, (vii) an improved theoretical understanding of DL systems, (viii) high barriers to entry, and (ix) training and optimizing the DL.Comment: 64 pages, 411 references. To appear in Journal of Applied Remote Sensin