Bayesian Nonparametric Unmixing of Hyperspectral Images

Hyperspectral imaging is an important tool in remote sensing, allowing for accurate analysis of vast areas. Due to a low spatial resolution, a pixel of a hyperspectral image rarely represents a single material, but rather a mixture of different spectra. HSU aims at estimating the pure spectra present in the scene of interest, referred to as endmembers, and their fractions in each pixel, referred to as abundances. Today, many HSU algorithms have been proposed, based either on a geometrical or statistical model. While most methods assume that the number of endmembers present in the scene is known, there is only little work about estimating this number from the observed data. In this work, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric framework that jointly estimates the number of endmembers, the endmembers itself, and their abundances, by making use of the Indian Buffet Process as a prior for the endmembers. Simulation results and experiments on real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, yielding results comparable with state-of-the-art methods while being able to reliably infer the number of endmembers. In scenarios with strong noise, where other algorithms provide only poor results, the proposed approach tends to overestimate the number of endmembers slightly. The additional endmembers, however, often simply represent noisy replicas of present endmembers and could easily be merged in a post-processing step

Simulated Annealing

The book contains 15 chapters presenting recent contributions of top researchers working with Simulated Annealing (SA). Although it represents a small sample of the research activity on SA, the book will certainly serve as a valuable tool for researchers interested in getting involved in this multidisciplinary field. In fact, one of the salient features is that the book is highly multidisciplinary in terms of application areas since it assembles experts from the fields of Biology, Telecommunications, Geology, Electronics and Medicine

Aprendizado ativo baseado em atributos contextuais de superpixel para classificação de imagem de sensoriamento remoto

Orientadores: Alexandre Xavier Falcão, Jefersson Alex dos SantosDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Recentemente, técnicas de aprendizado de máquina têm sido propostas para criar mapas temáticos a partir de imagens de sensoriamento remoto. Estas técnicas podem ser divididas em métodos de classificação baseados em pixels ou regiões. Este trabalho concentra-se na segunda abordagem, uma vez que estamos interessados em imagens com milhões de pixels e a segmentação da imagem em regiões (superpixels) pode reduzir consideravelmente o número de amostras a serem classificadas. Porém, mesmo utilizando superpixels, o número de amostras ainda é grande para anotá-las manualmente e treinar o classificador. As técnicas de aprendizado ativo propostas resolvem este problema começando pela seleção de um conjunto pequeno de amostras selecionadas aleatoriamente. Tais amostras são anotadas manualmente e utilizadas para treinar a primeira instância do classificador. Em cada iteração do ciclo de aprendizagem, o classificador atribui rótulos e seleciona as amostras mais informativas para a correção/confirmação pelo usuário, aumentando o tamanho do conjunto de treinamento. A instância do classificador é melhorada no final de cada iteração pelo seu treinamento e utilizada na iteração seguinte até que o usuário esteja satisfeito com o classificador. Observamos que a maior parte dos métodos reclassificam o conjunto inteiro de dados em cada iteração do ciclo de aprendizagem, tornando este processo inviável para interação com o usuário. Portanto, enderaçamos dois problemas importantes em classificação baseada em regiões de imagens de sensoriamento remoto: (a) a descrição efetiva de superpixels e (b) a redução do tempo requerido para seleção de amostras em aprendizado ativo. Primeiro, propusemos um descritor contextual de superpixels baseado na técnica de sacola de palavras, que melhora o resultado de descritores de cor e textura amplamente utilizados. Posteriormente, propusemos um método supervisionado de redução do conjunto de dados que é baseado em um método do estado da arte em aprendizado ativo chamado Multi-Class Level Uncertainty (MCLU). Nosso método mostrou-se tão eficaz quanto o MCLU e ao mesmo tempo consideravelmente mais eficiente. Adicionalmente, melhoramos seu desempenho por meio da aplicação de um processo de relaxação no mapa de classificação, utilizando Campos Aleatórios de MarkovAbstract: In recent years, machine learning techniques have been proposed to create classification maps from remote sensing images. These techniques can be divided into pixel- and region-based image classification methods. This work concentrates on the second approach, since we are interested in images with millions of pixels and the segmentation of the image into regions (superpixels) can considerably reduce the number of samples for classification. However, even using superpixels the number of samples is still large for manual annotation of samples to train the classifier. Active learning techniques have been proposed to address the problem by starting from a small set of randomly selected samples, which are manually labeled and used to train a first instance of the classifier. At each learning iteration, the classifier assigns labels and selects the most informative samples for user correction/confirmation, increasing the size of the training set. An improved instance of the classifier is created by training, after each iteration, and used in the next iteration until the user is satisfied with the classifier. We observed that most methods reclassify the entire pool of unlabeled samples at every learning iteration, making the process unfeasible for user interaction. Therefore, we address two important problems in region-based classification of remote sensing images: (a) the effective superpixel description and (b) the reduction of the time required for sample selection in active learning. First, we propose a contextual superpixel descriptor, based on bag of visual words, that outperforms widely used color and texture descriptors. Second, we propose a supervised method for dataset reduction that is based on a state-of-art active learning technique, called Multi-Class Level Uncertainty (MCLU). Our method has shown to be as effective as MCLU, while being considerably more efficient. Additionally, we further improve its performance by applying a relaxation process on the classification map by using Markov Random FieldsMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã

Spectral–Spatial Classification of Hyperspectral Imagery with 3D Convolutional Neural Network

Recent research has shown that using spectral–spatial information can considerably improve the performance of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. HSI data is typically presented in the format of 3D cubes. Thus, 3D spatial filtering naturally offers a simple and effective method for simultaneously extracting the spectral–spatial features within such images. In this paper, a 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) framework is proposed for accurate HSI classification. The proposed method views the HSI cube data altogether without relying on any preprocessing or post-processing, extracting the deep spectral–spatial-combined features effectively. In addition, it requires fewer parameters than other deep learning-based methods. Thus, the model is lighter, less likely to over-fit, and easier to train. For comparison and validation, we test the proposed method along with three other deep learning-based HSI classification methods—namely, stacked autoencoder (SAE), deep brief network (DBN), and 2D-CNN-based methods—on three real-world HSI datasets captured by different sensors. Experimental results demonstrate that our 3D-CNN-based method outperforms these state-of-the-art methods and sets a new record

Distributed Spacing Stochastic Feature Selection and its Application to Textile Classification

Many situations require the need to quickly and accurately locate dismounted individuals in a variety of environments. In conjunction with other dismount detection techniques, being able to detect and classify clothing (textiles) provides a more comprehensive and complete dismount characterization capability. Because textile classification depends on distinguishing between different material types, hyperspectral data, which consists of several hundred spectral channels sampled from a continuous electromagnetic spectrum, is used as a data source. However, a hyperspectral image generates vast amounts of information and can be computationally intractable to analyze. A primary means to reduce the computational complexity is to use feature selection to identify a reduced set of features that effectively represents a specific class. While many feature selection methods exist, applying them to continuous data results in closely clustered feature sets that offer little redundancy and fail in the presence of noise. This dissertation presents a novel feature selection method that limits feature redundancy and improves classification. This method uses a stochastic search algorithm in conjunction with a heuristic that combines measures of distance and dependence to select features. Comparison testing between the presented feature selection method and existing methods uses hyperspectral data and image wavelet decompositions. The presented method produces feature sets with an average correlation of 0.40-0.54. This is significantly lower than the 0.70-0.99 of the existing feature selection methods. In terms of classification accuracy, the feature sets produced outperform those of other methods, to a significance of 0.025, and show greater robustness under noise representative of a hyperspectral imaging system

Spectral Optimization of Airborne Multispectral Camera for Land Cover Classification: Automatic Feature Selection and Spectral Band Clustering

Hyperspectral imagery consists of hundreds of contiguous spectral bands. However, most of them are redundant. Thus a subset of well-chosen bands is generally sufficient for a specific problem, enabling to design adapted superspectral sensors dedicated to specific land cover classification. Related both to feature selection and extraction, spectral optimization identifies the most relevant band subset for specific applications, involving a band subset relevance score as well as a method to optimize it. This study first focuses on the choice of such relevance score. Several criteria are compared through both quantitative and qualitative analyses. To have a fair comparison, all tested criteria are compared to classic hyperspectral data sets using the same optimization heuristics: an incremental one to assess the impact of the number of selected bands and a stochastic one to obtain several possible good band subsets and to derive band importance measures out of intermediate good band subsets. Last, a specific approach is proposed to cope with the optimization of bandwidth. It consists in building a hierarchy of groups of adjacent bands, according to a score to decide which adjacent bands must be merged, before band selection is performed at the different levels of this hierarchy

Stochastic Feature Selection with Distributed Feature Spacing for Hyperspectral Data

Feature subset selection is a well studied problem in machine learning. One short-coming of many methods is the selection of highly correlated features; a characteristic of hyperspectral data. A novel stochastic feature selection method with three major components is presented. First, we present an optimized feature selection method that maximizes a heuristic using a simulated annealing search which increases the chance of avoiding locally optimum solutions. Second, we exploit local cross correlation pair-wise amongst classes of interest to select suitable features for class discrimination. Third, we adopt the concept of distributed spacing from the multi-objective optimization community to distribute features across the spectrum in order to select less correlated features. The classification performance of our semi-embedded feature selection and classification method is demonstrated on a 12-class textile hyperspectral classification problem under several noise realizations. These results are compared with a variety of feature selection methods that cover a broad range of approaches. Abstract © IEE