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

A Multiple Radar Approach for Automatic Target Recognition of Aircraft using Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar

Along with the improvement of radar technologies, Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Inverse SAR (ISAR) has come to be an active research area. SAR/ISAR are radar techniques to generate a two-dimensional high-resolution image of a target. Unlike other similar experiments using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to solve this problem, we utilize an unusual approach that leads to better performance and faster training times. Our CNN uses complex values generated by a simulation to train the network; additionally, we utilize a multi-radar approach to increase the accuracy of the training and testing processes, thus resulting in higher accuracies than the other papers working on SAR/ISAR ATR. We generated our dataset with 7 different aircraft models with a radar simulator we developed called RadarPixel; it is a Windows GUI program implemented using Matlab and Java programming, the simulator is capable of accurately replicating a real SAR/ISAR configurations. Our objective is to utilize our multi-radar technique and determine the optimal number of radars needed to detect and classify targets.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, International Conference for Data Intelligence and Security (ICDIS

Deep learning in remote sensing: a review

Standing at the paradigm shift towards data-intensive science, machine learning techniques are becoming increasingly important. In particular, as a major breakthrough in the field, deep learning has proven as an extremely powerful tool in many fields. Shall we embrace deep learning as the key to all? Or, should we resist a 'black-box' solution? There are controversial opinions in the remote sensing community. In this article, we analyze the challenges of using deep learning for remote sensing data analysis, review the recent advances, and provide resources to make deep learning in remote sensing ridiculously simple to start with. More importantly, we advocate remote sensing scientists to bring their expertise into deep learning, and use it as an implicit general model to tackle unprecedented large-scale influential challenges, such as climate change and urbanization.Comment: Accepted for publication IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazin

A Hybrid Neural Network Framework and Application to Radar Automatic Target Recognition

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found applications in diverse signal processing (SP) problems. Most efforts either directly adopt the DNN as a black-box approach to perform certain SP tasks without taking into account of any known properties of the signal models, or insert a pre-defined SP operator into a DNN as an add-on data processing stage. This paper presents a novel hybrid-NN framework in which one or more SP layers are inserted into the DNN architecture in a coherent manner to enhance the network capability and efficiency in feature extraction. These SP layers are properly designed to make good use of the available models and properties of the data. The network training algorithm of hybrid-NN is designed to actively involve the SP layers in the learning goal, by simultaneously optimizing both the weights of the DNN and the unknown tuning parameters of the SP operators. The proposed hybrid-NN is tested on a radar automatic target recognition (ATR) problem. It achieves high validation accuracy of 96\% with 5,000 training images in radar ATR. Compared with ordinary DNN, hybrid-NN can markedly reduce the required amount of training data and improve the learning performance

MUST-CNN: A Multilayer Shift-and-Stitch Deep Convolutional Architecture for Sequence-based Protein Structure Prediction

Predicting protein properties such as solvent accessibility and secondary structure from its primary amino acid sequence is an important task in bioinformatics. Recently, a few deep learning models have surpassed the traditional window based multilayer perceptron. Taking inspiration from the image classification domain we propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture, MUST-CNN, to predict protein properties. This architecture uses a novel multilayer shift-and-stitch (MUST) technique to generate fully dense per-position predictions on protein sequences. Our model is significantly simpler than the state-of-the-art, yet achieves better results. By combining MUST and the efficient convolution operation, we can consider far more parameters while retaining very fast prediction speeds. We beat the state-of-the-art performance on two large protein property prediction datasets.Comment: 8 pages ; 3 figures ; deep learning based sequence-sequence prediction. in AAAI 201