Joint interpolation of multi-sensor sea surface geophysical fields using non-local and statistical priors

This work addresses the joint analysis of multi-source and multi-resolution remote sensing data for the interpolation of high-resolution geophysical fields. As case-study application, we consider the interpolation of sea surface temperature fields. We propose a novel statistical model, which combines two key features: an exemplar-based prior and second-order statistical priors. The exemplar-based prior, referred to as a non-local prior, exploits similarities between local patches (small field regions) to interpolate missing data areas from previously observed exemplars. This non-local prior also sets an explicit conditioning between the multi-sensor data. Two complementary statistical priors, namely a prior on the spatial covariance and a prior on the marginal distribution of the high-resolution details, are considered as sea surface geophysical fields are expected to depict specific spectral and marginal features in relation to the underlying turbulent ocean dynamics. We report experiments on both synthetic data and real SST data. These experiments demonstrate the contributions of the proposed combination of non-local and statistical priors to interpolate visually-consistent and geophysically-sound SST fields from multi-source satellite data. We further discuss the key features and parameterizations of this model as well as its relevance with respect to classical interpolation techniques

A markovian approach to unsupervised change detection with multiresolution and multimodality SAR data

In the framework of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems, current satellite missions make it possible to acquire images at very high and multiple spatial resolutions with short revisit times. This scenario conveys a remarkable potential in applications to, for instance, environmental monitoring and natural disaster recovery. In this context, data fusion and change detection methodologies play major roles. This paper proposes an unsupervised change detection algorithmfor the challenging case of multimodal SAR data collected by sensors operating atmultiple spatial resolutions. The method is based on Markovian probabilistic graphical models, graph cuts, linear mixtures, generalized Gaussian distributions, Gram-Charlier approximations, maximum likelihood and minimum mean squared error estimation. It benefits from the SAR images acquired at multiple spatial resolutions and with possibly different modalities on the considered acquisition times to generate an output change map at the finest observed resolution. This is accomplished by modeling the statistics of the data at the various spatial scales through appropriate generalized Gaussian distributions and by iteratively estimating a set of virtual images that are defined on the pixel grid at the finest resolution and would be collected if all the sensors could work at that resolution. A Markov random field framework is adopted to address the detection problem by defining an appropriate multimodal energy function that is minimized using graph cuts

Information Extraction and Modeling from Remote Sensing Images: Application to the Enhancement of Digital Elevation Models

To deal with high complexity data such as remote sensing images presenting metric resolution over large areas, an innovative, fast and robust image processing system is presented. The modeling of increasing level of information is used to extract, represent and link image features to semantic content. The potential of the proposed techniques is demonstrated with an application to enhance and regularize digital elevation models based on information collected from RS images